Inspirational Minds

The Discover Magazine has come out with a list of the 20 best brains under 40 years old. Among them, there is Terence Tao , Jon Kleinberg and Lous von Ahn .

Tao has been described in the following way:Tao, now 33, is one of the most prolific and esteemed mathematicians in the nation. In 1999 he became UCLA’s youngest professor at age 24 and later won the 2006 Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize of math. In a discipline where one can spend a lifetime working on a single problem, Tao has made major contributions in a number of categories ranging from nonlinear equations to number theory-which explains why colleagues continually seek his guidance.

Kleinberg’s citation includes the following:

In the mid-1990s a Web search for, say, “DISCOVER magazine” meant wading through thousands of results presented in a very imperfect order. Then, in 1996, 24-year-old Jon Kleinberg developed an algorithm that revolutionized Web search. That is why today, that same search lists this magazine’s home page first. Kleinberg, now 37, created the Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search algorithm, which estimates a Web page’s value in both authority (quality of content and endorsement by other pages) and hub (whether it links to good pages).

Moreover, Ahn’s work has been described in the following way:

He helped develop this antispamming technology, known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), in 2000. CAPTCHA works because it is solvable by man but not by machine. Still, von Ahn’s ultimate goal is not to outwit computers; instead, he wants to exploit man’s unique intelligence to eliminate the machine’s shortcomings-while completing some useful tasks along the way.