2011 Hatherton Award to Dr Adam Day

The Hatherton Award for 2011 has been awarded to the pure mathematician Dr Adam Day for his paper entitled "Increasing the Gap between Descriptional Complexity and Algorithmic Probability" which was published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in October 2011. Dr Day was the single author of the paper and worked from the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, Victoria University of Wellington.

The paper is published in one of the world's top pure mathematics journals and reports a fundamental contribution to the area of algorithmic information theory, concerned with the relationship between the a priori probability of an event and the event's shortest descriptional length. The author has solved a 26 year old question in the area and the result is regarded by the referees as a tour de force of lasting value and considered a most significant result in algorithmic information theory.

Dr Day completed his undergraduate and PhD degrees at Victoria University under the supervision of Professor Rod Downey and has now received a Miller Fellowship to further his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The Hatherton Award is awarded annually for the best paper in physical, earth or maths and information sciences by a New Zealand University PhD student. It was established in memory of Trevor Hatherton FRSNZ, President of the Royal Society of New Zealand 1985-89, and awarded for the first time in 1997.