COMMENTS
With this year’s award, the jury for the Abel Award has shown that it also has a sense of timing.
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Published
Wednesday, 17 March 2021 – 22:36
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The price will be published during a pandemic that has necessitated home offices and digital meetings. And at the same time, a new hacker attack against the Storting and thus against Norwegian democracy is revealed. There is nothing to say about the topicality.
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For the first time are two mathematicians in computer science winners: the Hungarian László Lovász (72) and the Israeli-American Avi Wigderson (64). They receive the award for having expanded the overall mathematical knowledge in the world.
During the pandemic, computer technology has enabled a major step forward for humanity. Many companies have adopted new digital solutions. Across large parts of the world, for example. researchers, engineers, process operators, journalists, politicians, teachers, schoolchildren, national assembly delegates and housing associations met on various video telephony systems. We have long been familiar with FaceTime, Zoom and Teams have had their breakthrough over the past year.
And everyone, like other computer systems, has something to do with algorithms, encryption and data security.
The two prize winners has excelled among other researchers in these fields, in theoretical computer science and what is called “discrete” mathematics. Discrete mathematics is precisely the mathematics of the digital world. Few of us need to know what an algorithm is beyond that it is a plan or a recipe. Algorithms examine ways to solve a problem and can give us the most effective way to the goal. In the digital world we have become a part of, for example, automatic check-in on aircraft is an algorithm. And we can apply the recipe without necessarily having technological insight. We can leave the complicated work to the computer, iPad or mobile phone.
Lóvász and Wigderson have worked on the speed and use of resources of algorithms, with special emphasis on Internet security. They have shown that artificial intelligence can be used in protection work and for encryption. “Thanks to the pioneering work of these two, discrete mathematics and the relatively young field of theoretical computer science have now been established as central areas in modern mathematics,” says the chairman of the jury, Professor Hans Munthe-Kaas.
The special with the work of the two mathematicians is that the theoretical basis is developed at the same time as the technical and technological development in the digital field. It is a short way from theory to application. Lovász himself says that he has been lucky to have been able to participate in this combination.
Avi Wigderson, for his part, has drawn attention to “data complexity”, which includes the speed of algorithms. Here is a theoretical basis for internet security.
Today he is especially known for his work with cryptography, something we also enjoy in everyday life. When we e.g. trades in credit cards and trusts that the bank hides the password we use, Wigderson has a finger in the pie with what is called “ignorant proof”.
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