Nobel Prize Roundup 2024
Click to view"Hey where are the daily Nobel Prize posts?" said no one. I had a busy week last week and wasn't able to do the daily posts, so here's a round up for the nerds who care. Let's go!
Physics: John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton
"This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning. John Hopfield created a structure that can store and reconstruct information. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can independently discover properties in data and which has become important for the large artificial neural networks now in use."
Hopfield is a professor at Princeton, and Hinton is a professor at University of Toronto.
Chemistry: David Baker, Demis Hassabis, John Jumper
"The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential."
Baker is a professor at the University of Washington (WOO BIG 10!) and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Hassabis and Jumper are both at Google DeepMind, which is freaking me out.
Physiology or Medicine: Victor Ambros, Gary Ruvkun
"Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun discovered microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation. Their groundbreaking discovery in the small worm C. elegans revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation. This turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans. MicroRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function."
I think they did the bulk of their work at Harvard but Ambros is now a professor as UMass Medical School and Ruvkun is still at Harvard/Mass Gen.
Literature: Han Kang
"In her oeuvre, South Korean author Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose."
Peace: Nihon Hidankyo
"The grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again. The extraordinary efforts of Nihon Hidankyo and other representatives of the Hibakusha have contributed greatly to the establishment of a nuclear taboo."
Economics: Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James Robinson
"This year’s laureates have provided new insights into why there are such vast differences in prosperity between nations. One important explanation is persistent differences in societal institutions. By examining the various political and economic systems introduced by European colonisers, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson have been able to demonstrate a relationship between institutions and prosperity. They have also developed theoretical tools that can explain why differences in institutions persist and how institutions can change."
Acemoglu and Johnson are at MIT, and Robinson is at...just guess. I bet you can! Of course he's at [spoiler]the University of Chicago.
Video source | Main Source
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