Natural Science
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From the Register article:
“Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched a website on Tuesday where all their research material can be accessed for free. Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from 16 institutions the [sic] Digital Academic Repositories. No other nation in the world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in digital form, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are not amused.”
2006 Abel Prize: The BBC writeup is confusing: the $900,000 mathematics prize goes to Lennart Carleson mainly for proving that, as Fourier claimed, periodic waves can be broken down into sums of sines and cosines. But isn’t this an elementary result that has been known for a long time? Some digging reveals what he really accomplished: the proof that such Fourier series converge pointwise. This means that you can get arbitrarily close to any point of the approximated function if you sum enough terms in the series, and this wasn’t known until Carleson proved it in 1966. There is even a book about the result. Carleson also seems to have founded the theory of wavelets.
