A Greek MIT professor who won the prestigious 2018 Rolf Nevanlinna Prize in mathematics, said he was happy he was able to contribute to Greek thought through his work.
The news was announced on Wednesday at the International Conference of Mathematicians in Brazil, where Constantinos Daskalakis, a 37-year-old professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and principal investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in MIT, was awarded the prize.
“I am happy to be able to contribute to Greek thought. Greece has a lot of talent and I hope the conditions will soon be created to reduce the brain drain and our young people can create in Greece without distractions,” he reportedly told the Athens-Macedonian news agency.
“Nevanlinna is one of these awards you learn about when you are young, then you look at the list of the winners and you decide that the chances of winning it are negligent. When I learned that my work had been recognized with this tremendous distinction, I felt great honor and joy,” he added.
The prize is awarded every four years to a scientist under 40 deemed to have made a major contribution to the mathematical aspects of computer science.
Daskalakis was honored by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) for “transforming our understanding of the computational complexity of fundamental problems in markets, auctions, equilibria, and other economic structures,” MIT said.
He is an affable, gracious, down to earth man who was not affected by the fact that he rose to fame at such a young age. At the age of 27, Daskalakis was able to solve a puzzle that arose from Nash’s work, who showed an important mathematical theorem that attempts to characterize what we expect to occur in gambling. A betting game is the mathematical model of a conflict between people and it can represent a poker game, an auction or even the entire market. Every game involved several people, each with a purpose who want to have some gain.
Nash tried to understand if we can predict what will happen in the conflict before it occurs. So he gave an elegant mathematical definition, now called Nash equilibrium, about what happens in a game depending on its characteristics. However, he did not provide a relevant algorithm. He made a mathematical conjecture about what happens in games, but he did not provide a computational tool, which can be used to predict what will happen in advance. Since 1950, when Nash revealed his theorem, economists have been trying to find calculation algorithm. “What we have demonstrated is something that the scientific community was not expecting. There is no such algorithm,” said Daskalakis.