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The 2008 Kyoto Prize
2008
11 /11 Tue
Place：Kyoto International Conference Center
The 2008 Kyoto Prize Kyoto Prize Laureates
Lecture topics
The Power and Limits of Algorithms
Abstract of the lecture
Thanks to the sacrifices of my parents my three siblings and I had the benefit of a good education. Mathematics was my first love, and within mathematics I was drawn especially to algorithms. An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure for solving a computational problem. Familiar to all of us are the algorithms for arithmetic that we learned in school. Algorithms underlie every application of information technology. Search engines use algorithms to answer our queries for information, and the Internet uses an algorithm to transmit messages to their destinations. Electronic commerce depends on a simple, elegant algorithm for encrypting data to ensure privacy. As a child I entertained my friends by multiplying four-digit numbers in my head, using an algorithm that I had devised. Later, I designed an algorithm to schedule the classes at the school where my father taught mathematics. A good algorithm must efficiently give a correct result. The efficiency of an algorithm is measured primarily by the number of computation steps it requires.@I have developed efficient algorithms for practical problems such as computing the fastest rate at which information can flow to a destination within a network, or detecting repeated patterns within large bodies of data.@But the work for which I am best known is aimed at showing that some problems are so difficult that no efficient algorithms exist for their solution. Such problems, which are known as NP-complete problems, arise in virtually every area of application. The phenomenon of NP-completeness made workers in many fields aware that like the physical sciences, computer science has fundamental limits, governing the inherent complexity of computation. I am grateful to live at a time when I have been able to contribute to society by exploring the subject I love most. I am grateful for the example my parents set for me, and I find the greatest reward in the friendship and support of the many students, colleagues and friends who have shared my adventures in research.
Lecture topics
Thinking about How Living Things Work
Abstract of the lecture
I have been fascinated since I was young by the idea that we can use the tools of science to understand how living creatures work, and I can still vividly remember the moment when this notion forcibly struck me as a real possibility, thanks to the persuasive words of a biology teacher. Human beings all start life as a single cell, and indeed we can think of the cell as the basic unit of life — how cells function, how they evolve to become more complex, how they cooperate with one another to make structures such as the human brain, and what goes wrong with the cellular machinery in diseases like cancer, are questions that have gripped me with a passion. My first academic love was for classical languages such as Latin and Greek, and curiously our work on the proteins that organize cellular behaviour has revealed a kind of molecular language through which cells communicate with one another. Proteins are the functional molecules that execute the instructions implicit in the DNA, and are responsible for building cells and tissues, and controlling their behaviour. They are the targets of most therapeutic drugs, and aberrations in their functions underlie disease. We now realize that proteins are built from smaller blocks, rather like a childfs building toy, many of which serve to link proteins one to another. This creates a communications network within the cell, through which it exchanges signals with its neighbours. We have seen extraordinary advances in our understanding of the molecular basis for life, and we tend to think that we are deeply knowledgeable about human physiology and disease. But I would argue that we are still profoundly ignorant of how cells work; how living things work. The fun and excitement in biology is just starting. I believe that nothing is more important to us human beings than to know where we came from, and how we relate to the vast diversity of other species on the planet.
Lecture topics
What Drove Me to Philosophy
Abstract of the lecture
Aristotle tells us that the impulse which drives us to philosophize is gthaumazeinh, wonder at the world. In a way this is right. The most important philosophical moments are when something you have always taken for granted, barely even noticed, strikes you as remarkable, even astonishing. But there is another side to this wonder, and that is puzzlement. Once you are led to ask questions like these, you donft know how to go on. How should you formulate these questions? How to seek for an answer? This puzzlement can be painful, as much as the wonder is exhilarating; and both together drive you to try to formulate, articulate, deep issues of which you were unaware, issues you didnft know existed in the past (and which others may find weird). I want to talk of how wonder and puzzlement intruded into my life, and pushed me where I have gone. At first, I studied history. This seemed to be the best way. Then I became involved in politics; in the ways that politics could transform human life. But underlying all these was an interest in philosophical anthropology: what were human beings, these beings who can speak and therefore articulate, and in this way transform themselves? In contact with both history and politics as academic subjects, I began to see how often they are studied in a way which shuts out the questions I was asking. Often they suppose a stripped-down, reductive view of human life. A great deal of my work has been an attempt to combat this kind of reductive, over-simple, one-dimensional understanding. Another impetus was a more immediate practical one: how to articulate the political issues of our time, so that we can actually make headway. From this beginning point I will try in my lecture to make sense of the questions I have tried to deal with, of my understanding of philosophy as not gpureh, but involving a knowledge (in my case) of society and history. I will talk of the discouragements, and then (sometimes) break-throughs, which are inseparable from any life of the gphilosophicalh kind (which it can be seen is lived by lots of thinkers who are not philosophers in the narrow, academic sense).
