In his Will, John Charles fields proposed to establish the Fields Medal which has played since 1936
the role that the Nobel Prize might have placed if it were awarded to mathematicians (which it is
not). His proposal was accepted at The International Congress of Mathematicians at Zürich in
1932. However, it was not until the next congress, held at Oslo in 1936, that the Fields Medal was
first awarded. Fields Medals were then not awarded during World War II so that the second Fields
Medals were not awarded until 1950.
In his Will Mr.Fields wished that the awards should recognize both existing mathematical work
and also the promise of future achievement, and to fit these criteria the Fields Medals can only be
awarded to eminent mathematicans that are under the age of 40 at the time when the award
decision is being made. Unlike the Nobel, the Fields Medal can be shared by four, not three,
researchers.
(A similar proposal was discussed without success between Sweeden and Norway in 1905 for the
establishment of an Abel Prize in Mathematics and physical mathematics/ Physics. In 2001,
Norway alone established the substantial Abel prize for eminent mathematicians and also
mathematical physicists on a par with the Sweedish prize for sciences other than mathematics.
Considering the existing Crafoord prize which is also in Mathematics, it would seem that
mathematicians may easily become either over-prized or ‘over-priced’(?), whichever comes
first.)
The list of the Fields Medal winners is as follows:
- 1936 L V Ahlfors; J. Douglas
- 1950 L. Schwartz; A. Selberg
- 1954 K. Kodaira; J-P. Serre
- 1958 K. F. Roth; Renée Thom in France, for results in Topology (not awarded for
mathematical biology or catastrophy theory)
- 1962 L. V. Hörmander; J. W. Milnor
- 1966 Sir M. F. Atiyah, in UK; P. J. Cohen, in UK; Alexander Grothendieck (w. PhD
advisor L. Schwartz) at IHES; S. Smale.
- 1970 A. Baker; H. Hironaka; S. P. Novikov; J. G. Thompson
- 1974 E. Bombieri; D. B. Mumford
- 1978 P. R. Deligne (whose PhD advisor was A. Grothendieck) at IHES; C. L. Fefferman;
G. A. Margulis; D. G. Quillen.
- 1982 A. Connes at IHES, Paris, France; W. P. Thurston; S-T. Yau.
- 1986 S Donaldson; G Faltings; M Freedman
- 1990 V. Drinfel’d; V. Jones (some of his work is also fundamental in quantum operator
algebras)
- 1990 S. Mori; E. Witten
- 1994 P-L. Lions; J-C. Yoccoz; J. Bourgain; E .Zelmanov
- 1998 R. Borcherds; William T. Gowers, FRS, at Trinity College, Cambridge University,
in UK, for his work in functional analysis and combinatorics; (he is now asking a ‘tricky’,
but potentially important question: Is massively-collaborative mathematics possible ?!.
His answer. like his question, is non-trivial: “The idea would be that anybody who had
anything whatsoever to say about the problem could chip in”... a virtual forum (N.A.))
- 1998 Maxim Kontsevich, for his work in mathematical physics; Curtis T. McMullen
of Harvard University, for his work on holomorphic dynamics and geometry of
3-dimensional manifolds.
- 2002 L. Lafforgue; V. Voevodsky
- 2006 Andrei Okounkov;Grigori Perelman (declined to accept the Fields Medal); Terence
Tao; Wendelin Werner
A special award of the “IMU silver plaque” was given to Andrew J. Wiles at Princeton University
Institute for Advanced Study for his proof of Ferma’s Last theorem.
