The 2023 Abel Prize

Additional news this week includes the awarding of this year's Abel Prize in Mathematics to Luis A. Caffarelli, for his work in nonlinear partial differential equations.  Of interest to DTLR is his 1982 work, with Robert Kohn and 2015 Abel Laureate Louis Nirenberg, on singularities in the Navier-Stokes equations, work directly relevant to the topic of the (still unsolved) Clay Millenium Prize problem related to the Navier-Stokes equations.

The Abel Prize was begun a few years after I left graduate school, so I consider it a recent phenomenon.  It is intended to be considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics.  In reading the list of past laureates, I realized that I've attended lectures by several.  I attended a lecture by 2015 laureate John Nash at New York University, likely in 2008 or 2009.  Unfortunately Dr. Nash and his wife were killed while traveling home from the Abel Prize ceremony.  Also around the same era (Dec. 2008), I attended the 100th Statistical Mechanics conference of Rutgers University.  There were many notable speakers there, and as I reread the speaker list, I am amazed.  The 2007 Abel laureate, Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan, and future 2014 Abel laureate Yakov G. Sinai, both spoke there.  I honestly can't recall watching their lectures, nor those of many other luminaries on the list (including names I did not come to fully appreciate until over a decade later).  I do recollect sitting next to Juan Maldacena at the conference dinner, where I couldn't resist bringing up Lee Smolin's argument against string theory (see Smolin's book, The Trouble with Physics).  Dr. Maldacena's response (I'm paraphrasing) was that many smart people work on string theory, and they wouldn't be doing that if it were as hopeless as Smolin seems to think.

I have only met one Abel laureate in person, and only briefly, Peter D. Lax (2005), during a visit to the Courant Institute in the mid-2000s. Similarly, while I have attended lectures by dozens of Nobel laureates (too many to attempt to list here), I only met one in person, and again only briefly:  the late Paul C. Lauterbur, 2003 laureate in physiology or medicine.  I met him at a book signing of his at the San Francisco IEEE EMBS annual meeting in 2004.