Orion Crest, Series_1

Chapter 115: Receiving an award

　　Martin Chalfie, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, once said in an interview that if you're lucky enough to do a little bit of work, people will do a terrible thing to you-

　　They'll start saying to you, "Hey, you might win the Nobel Prize oh." Then from the first week of October, you'll start having constant insomnia and extreme sensitivity to any ringing, even the phone call from your neighbour's house will make you paranoid ......

　　Until, that is, the day you actually get a call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

　　Apart from the Swedish surprise, the main reason for this is to make sure that the winners don't go around bragging about it in advance, ruining the sense of expectation of the whole of humanity, or the whole of society as a scientific researcher.

　　The phone call to notify the winner of the prize is usually made a few minutes before the prize is awarded. As a result, the Nobel Prize call is probably one of the most anticipated calls in the world, with just a few minutes being enough to put one's mood through a bungee-jumping thrill.

　　Orion, who received the call, likewise had his heart experience a bungee jumping thrill in just one minute.

　　Because, unfortunately, it was clear that it couldn't be the Nobel Prize that approached him ......

　　But rather the Crafoord Prize.

　　Established in 1980 with a donation from industrialist Holger Crafoord and his wife, Anna Greta Crafoord, and with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in charge of its selection, the Prize, while slightly less golden in the world of maths, is traditionally considered a precursor to winning the Nobel Prize in the larger collection of the natural sciences.

　　As for why?

　　Because the original intention of this award was set up to fill the vacancy of the Nobel Prize, both the process and the specifications of the award ceremony, are in accordance with the standard of the Nobel Prize.

　　The scope of the award includes astronomy, mathematics, earth sciences and life sciences that the Nobel Prize wasn't covered, and the awarding mechanism is once a year, and rotates between astronomy and mathematics, earth sciences, and biological sciences.

　　This year, it happens to be the turn of astronomy and mathematics, which will be awarded to the most outstanding contributors in the field in the recent past, respectively.

　　Meanwhile, the prize money is half a million dollars.

　　Like the Nobel Prize, the Crafoord Prize, which is also selected and awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, usually informs the winners of the prize so abruptly a few minutes before the prize is awarded that Orion, who was having dinner with Witten, was caught off-guard by the unexpected phone call.

　　Orion actually won the prize, not so much for Goldbach's Conjecture, but for a series of studies in the field of prime numbers. The paper in the Annals of Mathematics a few days ago, however, was another addition to his list of accomplishments.

　　And it was still such an achievement that could not be ignored.

　　The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences then added the achievement of the Goldbach-Orion Theorem to the top of the winner's profile published on the official website.

　　A little dazed by the sudden half a million dollars and the medal, Orion couldn't even remember how he got from the canteen back to his office.

　　He only remembered that Witten laughed, patted him on the shoulder, and said congratulations to him, and then by the time he came back to his senses, he was already sitting in his office and had switched on his computer.