Oded has argued previously[1] against awards in academia.

[1]: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/on-awards.html

People may be tempted to call this hypocracy; i think it's classy.

Disliking a system and even publicly arguing against it, while still participating in it, is not hypocrisy, it is pragmatism.

It would be hypocrisy if he started giving out his own award.

Some would even argue that you can't meaningfully criticise a system without experience in it.

Why? He argues that other people shouldn't get awards, but he's willing to take them himself? Honestly, I don't get it. His stance does real harm to young theorists, especially those doing cross-disciplinary research.

But I think this is a minor issue, and don't want to take away from the bigger point, which is the award that he very much deserves.

I think there is a difference between arguing "there shouldn't be as many awards" and being negative about people receiving them. Has he demanded/argued for other people to decline their awards before?

He's famously opinionated: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/on-awards.html

Just a guess: It's a joke, referring to the fact that most people who win the $2.56 checks from Knuth don't cash them in.

The Knuth prize is different from the reward given for finding a bug in TeX.

Knuth's checks have their own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check

From the Wiki page:

> Very few of these checks were actually cashed, even the largest ones. More often they have been framed and kept as "bragging rights".[4][5]

Cashing a check only removes it from your possession if you hand it in to do so. Banks these days need only a physical scan of a check, e.g. via mobile phone deposit. Why not do both? There's nothing wrong with taking payment for your efforts.

AFAIK, after deposit, you're supposed to void a check by either destroying it or writing something on the front of it (such as "void")

(void*)