Prizes and Awards: It's That Time of Year

'Tis the season for prizes, or so it seems anyway. For starters, Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis received the 2007 Turing Award, the granddaddy of all computing awards, for their work on model checking, an automated technique for finding design errors in complex hardware and software. They share a $250,000 prize.

Moving from computing to mathematics, Pierre Deligne, Phillip Griffiths, and David Mumford are sharing the 2008 Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics. Deligne was honored "for his work on mixed Hodge theory, the Weil conjectures, the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence, and for his contributions to arithmetic," Griffiths "for his work on variations of Hodge structures; the theory of periods of abelian integrals; and for his contributions to complex differential geometry," and Mumford "for his work on algebraic surfaces; on geometric invariant theory; and for laying the foundations of the modern algebraic theory of moduli of curves and theta functions." The three share a $100,000 award.

This year's Crafoord Prize combined the fields of abstract mathematics with astrophysics. Maxim Kontsevich and Edward Witten received the 2008 Crafoord Prize in Mathematics from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, while Rashid Sunyaev received the Crafoord Prize in Astronomy. Kontsevich and Witten were cited "for their important contributions to mathematics inspired by modern theoretical physics." Half of the $500,000 prize goes to Kontsevich and Witten, the other half to Sunyaev.

Back in the field of computing, the 2007 Gordon Bell Prize went to a team of scientists--Kyle Caspersen, James Glosli, John Gunnels, David Richards, Robert Rudd, and Frederick Streitz--from Lawrence Livermore National Lab and IBM for a unique simulation of a phenomenon known as Kelvin-Helmholtz instability on the BlueGene/L. These gents will divy up a $10,000 prize.

And finally, there's the Dr. Dobb's Excellence In Programming Award, given this year to....uh, I can't tell you. It is still a secret. But the recipient will be honored in the upcoming April 2008 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal and in person at the SD West 2008 Conference on Wednesday, March 5, 2008. For a list of previous recipients, visit Dr. Dobb's Hall of Fame.

Congratulations to one and all for well-deserved honors.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 07:24 PM  Permalink