Friday, July 2, 2010

Richard Hamilton

Columbia University Mathematician Richard Hamilton is in the news for being credited by Grigori Perelman as having no less to do with solving Poincare's Conjecture than Perelman. Perelman just turned down the Clay Mathematics Institute's $1,000,000 Millennium Prize. Peter Woit goes into details here. Hamilton's biography from Wiki follows:


Richard Streit Hamilton (born 1943) is professor of mathematics at Columbia University.

He received his Ph.D. in 1966 from Princeton University. Robert Gunning supervised his thesis. Hamilton has taught at UC Irvine, UC San Diego, Cornell University, and Columbia University.

Hamilton's mathematical contributions are primarily in the field of differential geometry and more specifically geometric analysis. He is best known for having discovered the Ricci flow and suggesting the research program that ultimately led to the proof, by Grigori Perelman, of the Thurston geometrization conjecture and the solution of the Poincaré conjecture.

Hamilton was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry in 1996 and the Clay Research Award in 2003. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1999 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He also received the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Research in 2009.

Selected publications

External links

3 comments:

  1. The solution seems trivial and obvious. Clay Mathematics Institute should admit they made a mistake. They should back up and re-award the prize to both Richard Streit Hamilton and Grigori Perelman, the prize to be split $500,000 each. Should one of the two parties refuse the prize, then their prize winnings would then go to The American National Mathematical Museum (currently on the north shore of Long Island) and then donated in the name of the Museum to a scholarship fund, for financially disadvantaged American college-bound high school seniors with proven ability and intent to major in Mathematics.

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  2. You see you miss his entire point. It was a great gesture to turn down the money and give credit to a fellow college however the basis of the rejection is based on reducing mans metal ability to a dollar. He chooses not to be the donkey chasing the carrot.

    He was roughly quoted as saying "if I have proven how to control the universe what use would I have with money".

    Smell the coffee...

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  3. I smell it just fine thanks, and better yet with a touch of creamer.

    Listen, I don't mind Perelman taking a "moral stand," good for him. I'm just saying if it was me, I'd take it and put it to good use. Or maybe not if Putin and The Russian "Federation", which isn't, would tax the hell out of him. That would be a good reason for turning it down. IMO.

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