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2006 Fields Medalists Announced
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Aug 22, 2006 01:56 PM
from the i-like-math dept.
from the i-like-math dept.
otisaardvark writes "The 2006 Fields medals, awarded every four years and described as the Nobel Prize for Mathematics, have been awarded at the International Congress of Mathematicians. The winners are Grigory Perelman (famous for the ideas underlying the proof of the Poincare and Thurston geometrization conjectures) — who declined the prize, Terence Tao (a child prodigy famous for proving there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes, but who works mainly in nonlinear partial differential equations and harmonic analysis), Wendelin Werner (a probabilist working on links with 2D conformal field theories), and Andrei Okounkov (who works on the interface between algebraic geometry and physics)." Yours Truly wrote to mention that Grigory Perelman actually refused his Fields Medalist, on the grounds that he 'doesn't want to be seen as a figurehead'.
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Poincare Conjecture Proof Completed 222 comments
Flamerule writes "A New York Times article has finally provided an update on the status of Grigori Perelman's 2003 rough proof of the Poincaré Conjecture. 3 years ago, Perelman published several papers online explaining his idea for proving the conjecture, but after giving lectures at MIT and several other schools (covered on Slashdot) he returned to Russia, where he's remained silent since. Now, mathematicians in the US and elsewhere have finally finished going over his work and have produced several papers, totaling 1000 pages, that give step-by-step, complete proofs of the conjecture. In addition to winning some or all of the $1,000,000 Millennium Prize, Perelman now seems to be the favorite to receive a Fields Medal at the International Mathematics Union meeting next week, but it's not clear that he'll even show up!"
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New Yorker on Perelman and Poincaré Controversy 182 comments
b4stard writes "The New Yorker has an interesting article on the recent proof of the Poincaré conjecture and the controversy surrounding it. This is a very nice read, which, among other things, sheds some light on what may have motivated Perelman in refusing to accept the Fields medal." From the article: "The Fields Medal, like the Nobel Prize, grew, in part, out of a desire to elevate science above national animosities. German mathematicians were excluded from the first I.M.U. congress, in 1924, and, though the ban was lifted before the next one, the trauma it caused led, in 1936, to the establishment of the Fields, a prize intended to be 'as purely international and impersonal as possible.'"
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I-Like-WHAT? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I-Like-WHAT? (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong Link (Score:3, Informative)
He refused the Fields Medal? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
From the last link,
Not a flat refusal, butRe:He refused the Fields Medal? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:He refused the Fields Medal? (Score:4, Informative)
Umm, no -- Maths is apparently a painful subject for him. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (emphasis mine):
"On August 22, 2006, Perelman was awarded a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid. The Fields Medal is the highest award in mathematics; two to four medals are awarded every four years. Perelman received the award "for his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow"[3].
However, Perelman did not turn up at the ceremony[4], and declined to accept the medal.[5] He has consistently been described by those who know him as shy and unworldly. In the 1990s, he turned down a prestigious prize from the European Mathematical Society. According to Overbye and other sources, Perelman suffered a bitter split with the Steklov Institute (which failed to re-elect him as member[6]) in the spring of 2003, and according to the testimony of his friends currently finds mathematics a painful topic to talk about, even going so far as to say that they no longer interest him[7]. He is currently jobless and living with his mother in St Petersburg, subsisting on her £30-a-month pension.[8] This reminds some observers of previous examples of "disappearances" of extremely talented mathematicians from the mathematical scene, including Alexander Grothendieck.
Perelman is also due to receive a share of a Millennium Prize, should his proof become generally accepted. However, he has not pursued formal publication of his proof in a peer-reviewed mathematics journal, which the rules for this prize require - instead, he published the proof that he had been working on for 10 years on the internet.[9] The Clay Mathematics Institute has explicitly stated that the governing board which awards the prizes may change the formal requirements, in which case Perelman would presumably become eligible to receive a share of the prize. Perelman, however, appears to be uninterested in the money."
Re: (Score:2)
Re:He refused the Fields Medal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps he has.
Perhaps it doesn't involve large amounts of money and the winning of prizes.
Re:He refused the Fields Medal? (Score:5, Insightful)
"only on Slashdot would refusal of the money that comes with a Fields or Millenium award be considered insane," would be a more accurate statement, since Slashdotters are probably some of the few who even know what either is.
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Additionally, my karma's beyond uber so I don't consider it the game you ap
Dumbass. (Score:2)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't try for a +5 funny FP with
(slinks away sheepishly...)
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All I hear is a sort of vague sort of buzzing in my ears.
KFG
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Of course he declined the medal (Score:5, Funny)
As for declining the million bucks though, well, maybe "genius" is too strong a word for this guy. I think a much wiser course of action for him to take would be to accept that prize and donate the money to a worthy charity such as, for example, me.
Re:Of course he declined the medal (Score:5, Funny)
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As is obvious to even the most casual observer... (Score:5, Funny)
... having demonstrated that winning the Fields medal is possible, Perelman thereafter felt no need to bother actually receiving it, as the effort would have been redundant and pointless. Instead, he immediately set about theorizing a higher-order space in which Fields medals exist in multiple dimensions. He is even now working on an analysis of the connectedness of prize sets in the topology of the n-medal space.
There's something to be said... (Score:5, Funny)
It'd look like a publicity stunt if it were anyone other than our very own resident hermit Perelman...he's one of the very few truly quiet geniuses in the world.
TFA also says he's not too interested in the $1 million for the Poincare business...now that is insane. Sure, fame is a bit overrated, but money? At least he could buy himself a really, really nice hermit shack in the mountains.
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Maybe he just didn't feel like meeting Kim Fields to accept the prize. The Facts of Life wasn't a very good show, anyway.
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Wait.. scratch that first part.
(I know, I know.. I shamelessly re-used my own joke in the very same discussion, but funny mods generate no karma anyway).
They should make out the medal to... (Score:2, Funny)
I'm surprised anyone here knows of Alan Smithee (Score:3, Informative)
dibs. (Score:2)
Go ahead, check the comment history. I am the first, therefore (omiting some trivial intermediate steps)... the medal is mine.
See you at the top, non-figureheads!
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Sort of ironic. (Score:3, Informative)
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But at this pace, it'll b
Re:Sort of ironic. (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a very simple reason for this - a very large number of people in the world have seen many of the movies nominated for an Oscar, several of the TV shows nominated for Emmys, and have often heard much of the music nominated for Grammys. That is, there is a large viewing public with a vested interest in the results all hoping that "their" pick will win. On the other hand the number of people who have read work by those nominated for Field's medals is rather smaller. Consider, for example, the Nobel prizes where the most widely publicised (except for occasional science winners who made sufficiently significant breakthroughs that they were published widely in the popular press prior to winning) are the literature and peace prizes; that is, those prizes with whom the broadest range of the public can expect to be familiar with potential nominees.
I agree that it would be nice if more people took an interest in, say, the Nobel prizes in the sciences and Fields medals, but that would involve a much broader range of people taking an interest in the cutting edge of science and mathematics: a worthy goal, but a somewhat unlikely one. The cutting edge tends to be cutting because it takes a lot of work to get there. Awards ceremonies for cutting edge cinema tend to be as generally ignored as awards for cutting edge math (the only reason Cannes, for example, has gained any significant coverage is the degree to which it has mainstreamed itself). Perhaps it would be more productive to consider awards in math and science for people who do an excellent job of popularising or explaining existing material - you know, the sort of awards that Feynman would have regularly swept in physics, and would go to people like Ian Stewart in mathematics. Certainly there is an available niche for it, and more publicity for people who help to bring science and mathematics more into mainstream discourse could hardly be a bad thing.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is said that Diogenes once walked into Plato's home and starting stamping around on his carpets, yelling:
"I trample
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International Congress of Mathematicians (Score:5, Funny)
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I had a pretty hot abstract algebra prof. once.
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Well, what did you expect, once they developed calculus?
Re:International Congress of Mathematicians (Score:4, Informative)
I'd refuse the Fields medal, too... (Score:3, Funny)
Tao a child prodigy? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Tao a child prodigy? (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia entry for Terence (Score:5, Informative)
ICM gold before age 13, SAT math score of 760 at age 8, seriously, what the hell.
I wonder if he ever appeared for the Putname exams.
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I went to Terrence's website on Standford and looked over his classes and homework assignments and I didn't understand ANYTHING. I guess that's what you get for taking a leet professor in a leet college.
One interesting note tho, he did say you will pass h
Re:Wikipedia entry for Terence (Score:5, Funny)
Given that Terence's name is not Terrence, that Stanford is not spelled Standford, and that he is a professor at UCLA, not Stanford, is it surprising that you didn't undertand ANYTHING?
Re:Wikipedia entry for Terence (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't have any background in formal mathematics, I doubt you'd understand the homework assignments for upper-level mathematics coursework at a ho-hum state school. Mathematics is as much learning a language as it is learning a science, so you're no more dumb for not understanding his assignments than you are for not understanding an assignment in a class on Sanskrit.
That said, Undergraduate mathematics (algebra, analysis, some degree of differential equations, topology, a handful of other topics of interest) isn't that different from school to school. Even at "leet" (ugh) schools, mathematics is a common major for many students who do not intend to become mathematicians. Law schools like it, a lot of science types take it as a second major, and for indecisive students it's a bit more job friendly than History (though probably less useful, you're more likely to have to write at a job than prove Stoke's theorem). So while the coursework may be abstract, there's sort of a ceiling on the difficulty of major requirements, even at top schools, there's a limit to how much headache students with non-academic ambitions are going to want to endure. His grad students, on the other hand, are, I'm sure, worked to the bone.
Ze Frank says it best (Score:3, Interesting)
"Known as the Nobel Prize of Mathematics, the prestigious Fields Medal was awarded to four people under the age of forty that you wouldn't want to get trapped on an elevator with...."
He then goes on to disprove some of Grigory Perelman's more famous conjectures using a donut.
Perelman is not the first .... (Score:4, Interesting)
John Paul Sartre also turned down a Nobel Prize because he did not want himself associated with institutions or prizes.
I wonder if in the future an individual will turn down one of these major prizes on the grounds that the bulk of his/her knowledge was discovered, developed, and perpetuated by the work of people in society as a whole.
I can see this argument being made in Mathematics, where any serious and insightful contribution is necessarily based on dozens, if not hundreds, of years of complex and insightful mathematical discoveries. During my mathematical education I truly felt like I was a history class and only the insane math olympiad types ever managed to catch up with the present. (This is true except for fluid dynamics and combinatorics -- those fields are still wide open because fluid dynamics is extraordinarily hard and combinatorics is fairly new as a serious mathematical discipline.)
I personally still think that some people deserve special recognition for advancing the whole field as a whole -- I believe the hypothetical argument above is not very compelling.
Perelman, Wiles, and most other serious mathematicians like to be left alone. I'm not sure that Perelman will like it if NPR is calling him for comment about the latest mathematical discovery. I think his argument against becoming a figurehead is fairly sound; it is good that the Clay institute and the Fields people are not taking his refusals as a sign of disrespect.
Moreover, the Clay Institute intends to use the $1m dollars to promote Mathematics education in Russia. I think all parties are winners here.
Re:Perelman is not the first .... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is hardly the case. Most mathematicians (yes, even "serious" ones) realize that mathematics is not exclusively writing down a series of logical statements which prove difficult theorems. The lifeforce of mathematics, and thus the mathematician, is doing so and then *communicating* those results to their fellow mathematicians, and indeed to the rest of the world. I suspect that most (but obviously not all) mathematicians would be giddy with delight at so many people taking interest in their field of expertise (their work in particular), and the opportunity to talk about it at length. Further, for reasons not quite so abstract, mathematicians and mathematics departments rely on funding, so it behooves mathematicians to self-aggrandize -- let people know how big of a deal this is, why it was so important, and why people should keep paying them to keep doing it.
> Moreover, the Clay Institute intends to use the $1m dollars to promote Mathematics education in Russia. I think all parties are winners here.
I'm not sure where this came from, but this is almost certainly not the case. The Clay Institute has yet to officially decide how the prize will be distributed among mathematician(s) (if at all), let alone a contingency plan for what to do if one of the recipients declines the award.
by refusing the price he made it more famous (Score:3, Insightful)
(<intended pun>probably</intended pun> meaning measure theory), representation theory and algebraic geometry. This is about as cool as cool can get in math.
Re:Maybe he just doesn't want the prize? (Score:4, Interesting)
I received a couple of minor academic awards as a student, and I really didn't care about them. But I didn't make a stink about it and refuse them. It just seems like common sense and common decency to accept the attempted kindness.