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chiral3
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Joined: November 11th, 2002, 7:30 pm

Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 1:19 pm

QuoteDebreu is the one who, when he won, a math prof friend of mind said..."great, so you get a Nobel for proving that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket....Adam knew this...". Ha! That's funny. Yeah, Brouwer didn't even get a prize for coming up with the fixed point theorem.
 
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Nonius
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 1:22 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: elan<blockquote>Quote<hr><i>Originally posted by: <b>Nonius</b></i><blockquote>Quote<hr><i>Originally posted by: <b>chiral3</b></i>did he pick apart clifford algebras, spinors, and nonsymmetric covariance matrices?<hr></blockquote>He had one serious problem though: he was an ETH graduate!and a patent office worker....ain't that sort of like being a postal worker, or, er, like being Newton aka N?
 
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chiral3
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 1:26 pm

They used ether back then, not the luminescent, but the huffing kind. Now he has Kool-Aid
 
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elan
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 1:27 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: Nonius<blockquote>QuoteHe had one serious problem though: he was an ETH graduate!<hr></blockquote>and a patent office worker....ain't that sort of like being a postal worker, or, er, like being Newton aka N?Also, his research was completely misguided: in his theory of Brownian motion he relied too heavily on Gaussian (fat-tailless!) processes...
 
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N
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 1:37 pm

Also, his research was completely misguided: in his theory of Brownian motion he relied too heavily on Gaussian (fat-tailless!) processes...Wouldn't Langevin have said the reverse is true?? You don't know your history boy.
 
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elan
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 1:39 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: N<i>Also, his research was completely misguided: in his theory of Brownian motion he relied too heavily on Gaussian (fat-tailless!) processes...</i>Wouldn't Langevin have said the reverse is true?? You don't know your history boy.Remember, Dude? I am an ETH grad, too
 
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Nonius
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 1:42 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: elan<blockquote>Quote<hr><i>Originally posted by: <b>N</b></i><i>Also, his research was completely misguided: in his theory of Brownian motion he relied too heavily on Gaussian (fat-tailless!) processes...</i>Wouldn't Langevin have said the reverse is true?? You don't know your history boy.<hr></blockquote>Remember, Dude? I am an ETH grad, toowe won't hold that against you.
 
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N
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 1:43 pm

I almost forgot that they prohibit you from understanding Diff Geom there. Sorry
 
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elan
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 1:47 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: NI almost forgot that they prohibit you from understanding Diff Geom there. SorryYeah, no diff geom, and no fat tails.
 
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N
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 1:48 pm

Yeah, no diff geom, and no fat tails.Finally you got something right, congrat.
 
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Omar
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 11:23 pm

Quote Like Einstein, the other great mathematician who was also a great physicist in the 20th century, he worked on central problems in physics and came up with new mathematics to solve them. I beg to differ. I would say that Einstein (by all accounts that I'm aware of) was not a mathematician at all. He was a physicist, through and through. In fact, from the little that I know, my understanding is that his mathematics was actually quite poor, and that he required constant assistance from his more mathematically oriented friends. I think M Besso was one of them. I've also read a number of times that one of the reasons why it took him more than 15 years to develop the (correct) theory of (classical) gravity, was that it was very difficult for him to come to grips with tensor analysis which he needed to describe curvature, geodesics in curved spaces, etc. I also recall that I was quite surprised when I realised that he published a number of versions of "the theory of gravity" prior to the 1921 (??) paper, all of which were wrong. The reasons varied from his extraordinary ability to come up with "physical reasons" to justify his wrong ideas, to his lack of mathematical ability. This is all chronicled in great detail in A Pais' "Subtle is the Lord" (which I must admit, I haven't read from cover to cover). It's also scattered around some of his more technical, and less hagiographic biographies. Incidentally, only yesterday, I saw a paperback version of "Einstein in Love", by Dennis Overbye. Looks like a detailed account of his relationship with his first wife, Mileva Maric. A rather shadowy part of his life. No, Albert, was not a saint when he was younger (or even as a middle aged man). You can buy it used on amazon for about $1.00. But ---- he discovered General Relativity, one of the two deepest theories of modern physics. And while the other theory, Quantum Mechanics, was motivated by very strong experimental signals, and required the collaborative effort of a very large number of very smart people, Einstein produced General Relativity single handedly, motivated only by deep insight and intuition.
 
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Omar
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 10th, 2003, 11:27 pm

Quote Debreu is the one who, when he won, a math prof friend of mind said..."great, so you get a Nobel for proving that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket....Adam knew this...".Simon Herbert won it for saying that people don't behave rationally.
 
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richg
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 11th, 2003, 6:40 am

QuoteSimon Herbert won it for saying that people don't behave rationallyI take it you mean Herb Simon rather than Simon Herbert - then again maybe Simon Herbert won for empirically documenting inabilities to type rationally.
 
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Aaron
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 11th, 2003, 4:57 pm

I don't think our views are all that different. Einstein came up with astoundingly original explanations that turned out be be correct both experimentally and mathematically. In most cases, his original formulations were not expressed in conventional mathematical terms, and he did not make use of existing mathematical tools like Differential Geometry and Tensor Calculus (some people claim he had not even heard of these fields at the time he first published). His first wife Mileva Maric and friends like Marcel Grossman, John Kemeny and Michele Besso helped him tie his work to existing mathematics, and developed the tools so that practicing physicists could solve problems. With the exception of converting General Relativity to Tensor Field Equations, Einstein had little interest in this work (and I agree that in the one exception, it took Einstein a long time even with Grossman's help). The Einstein-Besso notebook shows how much of Einstein's conventional math work was done by a collaborator.I claim Einstein was a great mathematician because the original work is essentially mathematical, extremely important and highly original. Translating it into conventional terms, developing a toolkit and tying it to prior work was useful, but did not add essential mathematical insight. The fields of mathematics used in the process were obscure and abstract, Einstein's spark revitalized them.I agree Einstein never demonstrated a great facility to understand other people's mathematics, do incremental work in math or solve difficult math problems. I don't know whether he couldn't do these things or just never bothered. So I think it's fair to say that Einstein not a good mathematician among great theoretical physicists. But you don't have to be good to be great.Of course Einstein was not perfect. He seems to have mistreated his first wife physically, emotionally, possibly financially and in terms of intellectual credit; but this is a complicated story hard to judge from a distance. Overall, Einstein ranks pretty high on the good person scale: smart, humble, friendly, public-spirited and willing to stand up for political beliefs that were risky at the time but seem pretty sound today.
 
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mglendza
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Why didn't Mandelbrot get the Nobel

July 12th, 2003, 9:30 pm

Why certain people get Noble prizes and others like Mandelbrot don't? It all depends on the people involved in the process of choosing i.e, it's very subjective outcome. David Bohm missed the Noble Prize by one vote for the AB effect. For his early work in the founding of Plasma physics and in the work of influencing John Bell in his 1964 work in QM was not considered.Is Ed Witten a Mathematician, Physicist or Historian? It depends all on your view. Albert Einstein is many things to many people. The main thing is that he created works that matter. Who cares about prizes, names or nationalities? It is all anthropocentric and shoul be ignored!At the end all these prizes do not matter for genuine scientific work. Prizes belong to literature. The work of the likes of Mandelbrot and Bohm will live on while the names of some winners of Noble prizes will pale into insignificance with time.