Hacker News Reader

Comment by evanb | Hacker News Reader

The Nobel Prize in Physics often goes to "tooling" experimental work. Think: blue LEDs, CCDs, fiber optics, optical tweezers, things like that. Not that anybody asks me, but I would advocate a similar tooling award split between Berners-Lee (www), Knuth (TeX), and Ginsparg (arXiv). I can think of no people who had a more profound change in how physics is actually practiced.

View on HN

Maybe that's a sign that theory research in physics has become iredeemably suspect?

The Swedish bank (not an OG Nobel prize, but effectively one of them) prize for economics pretty much alternates (A) sharing the prize between econometrics (ie. tooling) and empirical research and (B) awarding deep theory.

I would push back on this. Irredeemably suspect? The Nobel committee doesn't make theory awards until they are supported by experiment. There was basically no new particle physics data for 30 years. Then they found the Higgs and that's nothing else. Theory beyond this is speculative, nobody knows if it's important or not.

I would love if there was a "Nobel Prize in Math, Computer Science, and Information Processing".

There’s the Godel Prize for theoretical computer science, the ACM Turing Award for more general contributions to computing, and of course the Fields Medal (and nowadays the Abel Prize) for math.

Iirc, Nobel specifically didn’t want there to be a category for math itself?

But I could be misremembering or have misinterpreted what I saw, which was in a non-authoritative source.

That's a very good point. Surely people on Hacker News collectively know enough people to get a nomination done? :-)

PS: the above list good, are we missing anyone important who ought to be on that list?

Maybe the HN community could set up an award?

I second this. lets do one.

How would we go about doing so?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com