ARTWORK: Eliza Williams
proving without knowing — the 2021 abel prizes in mathematics Andy Yin
A major prize was awarded on March 17 — the Abel Prize. It’s sometimes called the ‘Nobel Prize of maths’, because, cruelly, there is no Nobel for maths — Alfred Nobel was, apparently, more interested in rewarding practical discoveries than theory.
Discrete maths is concerned with ‘discrete’ objects — consisting of distinct parts — as opposed to ‘continuous’ objects like curves and functions. One of the major objects of study in discrete maths are graphs — collections of points connected by edges.
What makes a mathematician’s work worthy of elevation by an award like the Abel? Many are elevated for finding connections between different areas of maths, exposing similarities between the seemingly different. Mathematicians prize these connections because they can turn difficult problems in one mathematical ‘language’ into approachable problems in another.
It’s easy to see how these might be relevant to computer science, as models of networks or even the components of a computer, but graph theory has much older origins. One of the oldest and most famous problems in graph theory, originally posed in 1852, is the four-colouring of a map.
This year’s laureates — László Lovász of Hungary, and Avi Wigderson of Israel — were chosen for their lifetime achievements in linking two major theoretical disciplines: theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics.
Can every map be coloured with up to four colours such that no two adjacent regions share a colour? In other words — how many colours of ink does a cartographer need to have in stock? It seems like a daunting task.
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