## Friday, March 24, 2006

### Lennart Carleson wins Abel prize

Lennart Carleson (78) who is described by the British socialist daily "The Guardian" as the inventor of the Fourier series whose discovery was used in the electronic components of iPod :-) has been awarded by the Abel prize which includes half a million British pounds. The prize is intended to be a mathematical counterpart of the Nobel prize, as demonstrated by the verse Nobel-Abel, and can only be awarded to mathematicians who avoid non-Abelian gauge theories. See news.google.com.

More seriously, Carleson has studied "complex dynamics" of complex maps such as the Henon map, convergence and growth of partial sums of Fourier series, interpolations of bounded analytic functions, and many other things, some of which look like simple math but it may be just a wrong impression. Most famously, Carleson has proved the Corona theorem in the early 1950s.

When we talk about the millions of dollars: the Kennedy School of Government has received \$1.5 million to support women in politics, under the slogan "From Harvard Square to the Oval Office". Actually I did not know that Lewinski had a Harvard degree.

Bug in MSIE 6

There exists another reason to download the new excellent Internet Explorer 7 that we discussed here. The new, March 20th edition of its beta 2 preview is the first version of a Microsoft browser that is not (according to Microsoft Security Response Center Blog) affected by the new, highly critical text-handling bug that allows hackers to do anything with your computer they want, including eating the food from your fridge. Note that if you have installed a previous version of Internet Explorer 7, you must first uninstall it before installing the new one.