So you don’t know who Neil Turok is, and you don’t know what the TED Prize is? Let me explain both.
The TED Prize was introduced in 2005, and it is unlike any other award. Although the winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, the real prize is that they are granted a WISH. “A wish to change the world.” There are no formal restrictions on the wish. We ask our winners to think big and to be creative. The goal is that it creates an incredible sense of excitement and common purpose. It inspires the TED community, and all those who hear about the wish, to offer their help in making the wish come true.
Three winners are chosen each year. They could be anyone with world-changing potential: inventors or entrepreneurs, designers or artists, visionaries or mavericks, story-tellers or persuaders. But they must be people who the judges believe have the ability to inspire others to do something great for the world.
And this year, one of the winners of the TED Prize was a South African. You guessed it, Neil Turok.
Let me tell you a bit about the man from the TED site:
Cosmologist and education activist
Neil Turok holds the Chair of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University. In 1992 he was awarded the James Clerk Maxwell medal of the Institute of Physics for his contributions to theoretical physics.
Turok has worked in a number of areas of mathematical physics and early-universe physics, focusing on observational tests of fundamental physics in cosmology. In the early 1990s, his group showed how the polarization and temperature anisotropies of the cosmic background radiation would be correlated, a prediction which has been confirmed in detail by recent precision measurements by the WMAP satellite mission. The team also developed a key test for the presence of the cosmological constant, also recently confirmed.
Turok and collaborators developed the theory of open inflation. With Stephen Hawking, he later developed the Hawking-Turok instanton solutions, describing the birth of an inflationary universe. Most recently, with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton, Turok has been developing a cyclic model for the universe, in which the big bang is explained as a collision between two “brane-worlds” in M-theory. In 2006, Steinhardt and Turok showed how the cyclic model could naturally incorporate a mechanism for relaxing the cosmological constant to very small values, consistent with current observations. Steinhardt and Turok cowrote the recent popular science book Endless Universe.
In 2003, Turok, who was born in South Africa, founded the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Muizenberg, a postgraduate educational center supporting the development of mathematics and science across the African continent.
Here’s a video of the man, it’s long (don’t say I didn’t warn you):
I must admit that I am somewhat apprehensive to go in to any detail about the man because I am sure I’ll screw up his line of work and tell you that he is an astro-physicist-neurological-rocket-scientist. So basically I’m gonna be steering clear of any sort of in depth analysis.
All I can tell you is the man is literally a genius. Literally. They call him the African Einstein and there is no doubt that this is relatively close to the truth.
He is not only smart (genius) but generous and intuitive. This possibly comes with the TED territory but nonetheless his actions, achievements and intentions are all admirable.
To view the TED Prize video for 2008 Visit This Link (there was no embed code that I could find).
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