Timeline for What are the main contributions to the mathematics of general relativity by Sir Roger Penrose, winner of the 2020 Nobel prize?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
49 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 10, 2020 at 14:08 | comment | added | Hollis Williams | Dirac suggested to Harish-Chandra that he work on further classification of the representations of the Lorentz group having himself written one of the first important papers on this topic, this is an interesting story which I would recommend looking into. | |
| Oct 9, 2020 at 16:09 | vote | accept | zeraoulia rafik | ||
| Oct 8, 2020 at 16:47 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @HollisWilliams : Is there some Exclusion Principle that forbids someone from being both a mathematician and a physicist, even if he describes himself as both? | |
| Oct 8, 2020 at 15:54 | comment | added | BigbearZzz | The takeaway was that he said it's important to broaden your knowledge to other areas as well that aren't directly related to what you're doing. That allowed him to transition into mathematical physics smoothly, in fact so smoothly that many people would call him a physicist instead of a mathematician. I don't think it's wrong to call him a physicist considering all his contributions to the subject but saying that he's not a mathematician is most likely a statement that he himself wouldn't agree to. | |
| Oct 8, 2020 at 15:50 | comment | added | BigbearZzz | The context was that one of the participant asked how could the government do better to support his kind of research so that more young researchers become interested and (jokingly I believe) go on to win a Nobel prize. His answer was that his work was mathematical and there isn't a Nobel prize for mathematics. He also told stories about the talks he gave back in the days about other mathematics (like mathematical logic iirc) that he was interested in that aren't related to algebraic geometry, his main research. | |
| Oct 8, 2020 at 15:35 | comment | added | Hollis Williams | I was there in person at a lecture he gave a few months ago which was advertised to everyone from the Mathematics department and he was very clear that he was a physicist and only talked about physics. He probably changes how he self-describes depending on the audience so I would not take that literally. | |
| Oct 8, 2020 at 15:26 | comment | added | BigbearZzz | @HollisWilliams Prof. Penrose even called himself a mathematician 2 days ago in a small online event to congratulate his Nobel prize. I was there. | |
| Oct 8, 2020 at 10:42 | history | edited | gmvh | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Minor corrections
|
| S Oct 8, 2020 at 10:29 | history | suggested | Obinna Okpolu | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
spelling errors were corrected
|
| Oct 8, 2020 at 9:14 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Oct 8, 2020 at 10:29 | |||||
| Oct 8, 2020 at 0:40 | answer | added | Willie Wong | timeline score: 25 | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 20:09 | comment | added | Alexandre Eremenko | @zeraoulia rafik: I don't think this my question will quality as a good question here: this is a matter of opinion, and the discussion in the comments above shows this. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 18:25 | comment | added | RBarryYoung | I can certainly think of several who should have been considered for Nobel prizes in physics, such as David Hilbert, Hermann Minkowski and Emmy Noether. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 18:18 | comment | added | RBarryYoung | No, Penrose is a mathematician, his PhD was in algebraic geometry, I believe. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 18:16 | answer | added | Hollis Williams | timeline score: 16 | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 17:48 | comment | added | Hollis Williams | Roger Penrose is a physicist, he is not a mathematician, although he is the closest thing to a mathematician to win the Nobel Prize. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 13:59 | comment | added | user1504 | Also, Eugene Wigner, who was definitely a mathematician, and therefore 'mathematician-like'. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 13:42 | comment | added | user1504 | @AlexandreEremenko I think Dirac is probably the most mathematician-like of the physics Nobel laureates. Aside from his style of doing doing physics, he introduced a lot of ideas into mathematics: Dirac operators, distributions, spectral theory for unbounded operators... And he was Harish-Chandra's PhD advisor! (That alone ought to count for something...) | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 13:27 | history | edited | zeraoulia rafik | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 316 characters in body
|
| Oct 7, 2020 at 13:11 | comment | added | Alexandre Eremenko | @Tomothy Chow: On my opinion, the closest candidate is Chandrasekhar. The difference between a theoretical physicist and a mathematician is sometimes subtle and hard to describe. But when a mathematician reads a book of some author, s/he can easily tell the difference. Perhaps the reason of this difference is in education. Penrose was educated as a mathematician, and his advisers were pure mathematicians. A similar case is Freeman Dyson. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 12:27 | history | edited | zeraoulia rafik | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 65 characters in body
|
| Oct 7, 2020 at 12:19 | vote | accept | zeraoulia rafik | ||
| Oct 7, 2020 at 13:30 | |||||
| Oct 7, 2020 at 9:57 | history | edited | gmvh | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Copyediting, added "ho.history-overview" tag
|
| Oct 7, 2020 at 4:30 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Oct 7, 2020 at 3:48 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | At some point the fact that they are ignoring hugely important ideas like those of Hawking and Penrose starts to become an obvious problem and perhaps this has caused them to rethink their criteria. In Penrose’s case, the fact that he has a hugely impressive other body of work gives a good reason to find something to give him the prize for, even if they need to fudge their usual criteria. Hawking unfortunately didn’t live long enough to take advantage of this." - math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12009#comment-237484 | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 3:47 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | Okay, here's an interesting comment of Peter Woit from his blog that I couldn't help but share here as well: "One guess as to what’s going on here is that the lack of good new testable ideas about fundamental physics in recent decades has meant that if the Nobel committee wants to stick to rewarding only things that pass experimental test, then they will have to give awards to less and less impressive results... | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 3:40 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | @TimothyChow: I agree that under the normal "rules" for physics Nobel Prizes, the twistor theory has not made a prediction which has been verified by empirical evidence; but it's also not clear to me that the singularity theorem - which he was cited for - makes such a prediction either. Which is part of the reason it's so stunning to see a mathematical physicist like Penrose earn the Nobel Prize. But maybe this is more a question for the physics stack exchange. | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 3:39 | comment | added | David Roberts♦ | @zeraouliarafik please refrain from giving like of the form "this article" with an unstable url. Best is to use a doi link (as it now is) and include some information about the paper. I couldn't tell, for instance, that the article you linked was joint work, or when it was written etc, until I went to it (which people on phones might not want to do). | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 3:32 | history | edited | David Roberts♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Put in proper reference and doi link. Minor formatting
|
| Oct 7, 2020 at 1:02 | history | edited | Qfwfq | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
(title)
|
| Oct 7, 2020 at 0:50 | history | edited | zeraoulia rafik | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 2 characters in body
|
| Oct 7, 2020 at 0:48 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @AlexandreEremenko : there's a list here but the examples aren't very convincing. Maybe Max Born is the best candidate prior to Penrose? | |
| Oct 7, 2020 at 0:48 | history | edited | zeraoulia rafik | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 344 characters in body
|
| Oct 7, 2020 at 0:30 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Todd Trimble | ||
| Oct 6, 2020 at 23:43 | comment | added | zeraoulia rafik | @AlexandreEremenko, you have asked a nice question I ask you to post it here in MO as a community wiki question | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 23:30 | comment | added | zeraoulia rafik | @AlexandreEremenko, I think yes and this is exactly what I want to know in the side of his contribution | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 23:28 | comment | added | Alexandre Eremenko | Amazing news indeed: is he the first true mathematician to receive a Nobel prize in pysics?! | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 23:12 | comment | added | Alexandre Eremenko | Of his many fundamental contributions to mathematics Penrose tiling should be also mentioned: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_tiling. | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 22:46 | answer | added | S. Maths | timeline score: 22 | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 22:43 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | If conjectures count, there is also the colorfully named (weak) cosmic censorship hypothesis. Regarding the Nobel Prize itself, my impression is that the prize is usually awarded only when there is rock-solid empirical confirmation. If that is true then twistor theory would be unlikely to qualify. | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 22:12 | answer | added | Mirco A. Mannucci | timeline score: 34 | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 21:06 | history | edited | kodlu | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
fixed spelling of prize name
|
| S Oct 6, 2020 at 20:47 | history | edited | zeraoulia rafik | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
corrected spelling in title
|
| S Oct 6, 2020 at 20:47 | history | suggested | RobPratt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
corrected spelling
|
| Oct 6, 2020 at 20:47 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Oct 6, 2020 at 20:47 | |||||
| Oct 6, 2020 at 20:45 | history | edited | zeraoulia rafik | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
edited body; edited tags
|
| Oct 6, 2020 at 20:35 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorem is the stated reason for the Nobel prize, other contributions to GR include the Newman-Penrose formalism, the Penrose diagram, and the Geroch–Held–Penrose formalism | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 20:31 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | There was another question about Penrose earlier today: mathoverflow.net/questions/373423/penrose-s-singularity-theorem. Note that his twistor theory is maybe what he's best known for- but it was not the cited reason for his Nobel Prize. | |
| Oct 6, 2020 at 20:28 | history | asked | zeraoulia rafik | CC BY-SA 4.0 |