Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Yves Meyer Wins 2017 Abel Prize!

Yves Meyer has won the 2017 Abel Prize for his work on the theory of wavelets. Here is an article in Nature about it.

I am puzzled as to why Ingrid Daubechies didn't share this prize.

Update: Terry Tao has written a short blog post about the prize. Among other things (and I hadn't caught this), note the following text from Tao: Daubechies also made extremely important contributions to the theory of wavelets, but my understanding is that due to a conflict of interest arising from Daubechies’ presidency of the International Mathematical Union (which nominates members of the Abel prize committee) from 2011 to 2014, she was not eligible for the prize this year, and so I do not think this prize should be necessarily construed as a judgement on the relative contributions of Meyer and Daubechies to this field.

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