[HN Gopher] Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling ...
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Michel Talagrand wins Abel Prize for work wrangling randomness
Author : jnord
Score : 214 points
Date : 2024-03-20 11:12 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| agumonkey wrote:
| Following Shaw Price in 2019
| https://invidious.projectsegfau.lt/watch?v=22hR2CkNGXE
| novariation wrote:
| I've used and read about many concentration inequalities in
| machine learning and other applied math disciplines (Hoeffdings,
| McDiarmid, etc).
|
| Talagrands' results seem to generalize those, but I haven't had
| the chance to see them in the wild (yet).
| wslh wrote:
| Ironically, the Wikipedia pages about him in French [1] and
| English [2] are, currently, super short. It will help if
| Wikipedia (just giving them as an example) could handle the focus
| on certain people and topics in an smarter way and not after the
| facts. Wikipedia has a special opportunity about handling this
| because it is the canonical general reference on Internet.
|
| Hallucinated or not I found a better starting point on [3], a
| Reddit post of 2 years ago with a comment saying:
|
| "Even professional mathematicians are barely qualified to choose
| the best mathematician in their narrow field of expertise, let
| alone in general...
|
| (Before I left math, the most difficult work I encountered was by
| Michel Talagrand.)" [4] and last, but would be first indeed his
| own web page [5]. He even gives prizes ala Knuth for solving
| specific math problems.
|
| Last, really few mentions in *stackexchange.com and Reddit.
|
| [1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Talagrand
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Talagrand
|
| [3]
| https://chat.openai.com/share/39374448-da85-4897-977a-aaa37e...
|
| [4]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/s81ysm/who_would_you_...
|
| [5] https://michel.talagrand.net/
|
| [6]
| https://www.google.com/search?q=Michel+Talagrand+site%3Astac...
| and
| https://www.google.com/search?q=Michel+Talagrand+site%3Aredd...
| hopfenspergerj wrote:
| That was me on Reddit. I emailed him asking about some of his
| work on invariant means in the 1970s. He said "I had no taste
| then", and told me what a waste of time it was.
|
| At that point, I decided to go into data science instead of
| trying to get a post doc...
| jebarker wrote:
| How do you feel about that decision now? I left math after my
| PhD and often find myself feeling nostalgic about it.
| otoburb wrote:
| Always something to look forward to in [early] retirement
| to keep the mind active.
| epgui wrote:
| > [...] and not after the facts
|
| Wikipedia is an _encyclopedia_ , they intentionally only cover
| topics retroactively, and preferably after the dust has
| settled. They're intentionally not intending to be many things,
| including a source of up to date news:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
| wslh wrote:
| No pun intended. We all see (right?) that one of the cultural
| topics of the XXI is about focus. In a relative past people
| could study and/or read "all" texts and be intellectuals or
| feel like that. It is obvious that the focus economy always
| existed but now there are zillions of potential content to
| consume (good or not, doesn't matter).
|
| Wikipedia, as an example, has the opportunity to add layers
| (not many) of content in the quest of helping (not solving)
| this focus problem. As you said Wikipedia does not currently
| has this purpose, but this does not mean that they cannot
| carry the lit torch and pay attention to the focus economy
| (wordplay just by chance).
|
| It is also important to highlight that Wikipedia has many
| externalities, it is not just them. For example, Wikipedia
| results are generally the first that cames up in a search
| engine and their content is much used in machine learning. In
| this context, the problem of focus is not just about
| Wikipedia itself but the "focus graph" that has Wikipedia as
| one of the top releveant nodes.
| tptacek wrote:
| Wikipedia is premised on being a tertiary source, and pays
| a price for every "layer" of content they add in volunteer
| time needed to correct inaccuracies, which are constantly
| being added. People have all sorts of ideas about things
| Wikipedia could be besides an encyclopedia, but the project
| is (wisely) not receptive to any of them. Meanwhile: if
| you're right about this, you can just fork and track
| Wikipedia and do your own site.
| wslh wrote:
| Even, beyond that, Wikipedia, again, as an example, has
| faults on its own merits: I keep reading about Michel
| Talagrand and find this entry [1] which mentions his work
| first but there is no link in [2] to [1] (at least now).
|
| I will try to restate this, for the sake of an
| interesting discussion, in a completely different
| direction but using Wikipedia as an example: in software
| engineering we create different kind of tests for our
| software systems, I think Wikipedia should add "unit
| tests" and other tests to augment, fix, and link their
| current content.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorization
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Talagrand
| pvg wrote:
| Wikipedia has more process (and is by most measures, more
| important and successful) than most software most people
| work on so I'm not sure tips from software engineering is
| what they are missing.
| wslh wrote:
| Are you saying that Wikipedia doesn't need to innovate
| and just leave their organization as it is? I follow
| Wikipedia since its inception and it seems part of its
| processes, as in major organizations, amplifies
| bureaucracy more than process innovation. Any
| organization is not only their throughput but their
| processes, including resources as humans.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm sure there's any number of things they can do better,
| but revisiting their entire premise isn't just a
| suggestion, it's a request that they become a completely
| different thing.
|
| Wikipedia is probably the single most successful human
| knowledge project of the last 100 years. It sounds crazy
| saying that out loud! Maybe it's not true! But that it's
| even a colorable argument speaks to how little software
| engineers have to contribute to its fundamental
| direction. It's not about us.
| juliusdavies wrote:
| Last 5000 years.
|
| Personally I don't care about AI, but there would be no
| AI without Wikipedia.
| wslh wrote:
| I agree with you with the importance of Wikipedia but it
| should be noted the acceleration of technology (not
| talking about singularity!) that will impact them. It is
| the acceleration of the means in the relationship of
| humans with technology. This is a fact.
|
| The innovation dilemma is always present, even for NGOs.
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| The point is that his work (and by extension himself) was
| encyclopedia-worthy long before he got the prize. Or he
| wouldn't have gotten the prize. Wikipedia doesn't wait until
| after the oscars to include movie.
| epgui wrote:
| All of us were always free, and are still free, to
| contribute to making his wiki page better!
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| Wikipedia editors delete pages about people not deemed
| notable enough. Especially women:
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wikipedia-bias-1.6129073
| Meanwhile, a list of supplemental roads and rural
| secondary highways in Kentuck (3000-3499) is
| encyclopedia-worthy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o
| f_Kentucky_supplemental_...
| teddyh wrote:
| If we assume that there is a group of people giving a
| concerted effort to acknowledge women in general, would
| that not lead to more articles about women being created?
| And, _purely statistically_ , would not this in turn lead
| to more articles about women being rejected for being
| insufficiently notable? There is no need to assume bias
| in Wikipedia editors, the bias could just as well lie
| with those people who create the many rejected articles.
|
| Also, one criteria which Wikipedia must, by necessity,
| use, is "published articles in other media about the
| subject". If _other media_ are, in general, biased, this
| would lead to a dearth of articles in other media, which
| in turn would lead to Wikipedia rejecting new WP
| articles.
| shnock wrote:
| What evidence is there for said concerted effort?
| teddyh wrote:
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wik
| iPro...>
| epgui wrote:
| How is this statistical problem (which I'm prepared to
| acknowledge) an actual barrier preventing you from
| improving any given article?
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| Because I'm not going to put in the work just to see it
| deleted by zealous editors.
| epgui wrote:
| There is no basis in your purported belief that quality
| contributions that follow the rules will get deleted.
|
| Wikipedia editors are not out there to suppress women--
| The fact that this de facto happens is more likely a
| reflection of systemic social issues.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Surely Wikipedia editors are part of society? So
|
| > is more likely a reflection of systemic social issues.
|
| contradicts
|
| > Wikipedia editors are not out there to suppress women
| captn3m0 wrote:
| His homepage has this interesting snippet:
|
| > If you are desperate to get my books and your library can't
| afford them, try to type the words "library genesis" in a
| search engine. I disagree with piracy, but this site saved me
| many trips to the library, which unfortunately does not carry
| electronic versions of older books.
| pyb wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18131009 for an
| earlier discussion of scientific blind spots in Wikipedia.
|
| I also wish there was a mechanism to prune certain Wikipedia
| pages that carry way too much detail, given the notability of
| their subject.
| ginnungagap wrote:
| I know Talagrand because some of his work comes up in topological
| dynamics (work around Rosenthal's l1-dichotomy culminating in the
| Bourgain-Fremlin-Talagrand dicothomy for compact sets of Baire
| class 1 functions), but I had no idea he has such accomplishments
| in other fields! Impressive
| zafka wrote:
| I really enjoy this sort of story. Someone persevering in an
| unpopular arena for the love of it, and then having it become
| quite essential for the advancement of humanities goals as it is
| developed.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| thats pretty much also the story of deep learning isn't it, i
| too enjoy reading about researchers who have a pure devotion to
| their subject.
| mturmon wrote:
| What an amazing output.
|
| Reading his papers, he manages to connect basic geometric ideas
| (like the notion of "isoperimetry", i.e., enclosing the maximum
| volume within a given perimeter) to probabilistic notions like
| convergence of averages. It links together stuff you learn in
| information theory (the probability mass of the "typical set"),
| and in machine learning (deviations of an training-set error rate
| from a true error rate), and in probability theory (empirical
| processes).
|
| His papers typically had an introduction that related the main
| theorem to some of these basic geometric notions. The
| introduction would reveal a whole new, very intuitive and
| geometric connection between a very abstract theorem to basic
| geometry, like the volume of a spherical shell. It would
| routinely blow my mind.
| matsemann wrote:
| > _fell in love with his future wife, a statistician, at first
| sight (he proposed to her three days after meeting her)_
|
| Was that after sampling 1/e prospects?
|
| (The "marriage problem" is applied statistics on when it's
| optimal to stop searching for something
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem )
| esafak wrote:
| > He recalls with delight that he once used a cab service whose
| owner recognized his name, having learned the inequality during a
| probability class in business school.
|
| The taxi drivers in France are cut from different cloth!
| 2716057 wrote:
| Slightly off-topic - has anyone read his book "What is a Quantum
| Field Theory"? Can you recommend it?
| amai wrote:
| See a review here:
| https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12819
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