2006 Fields Medals

The 2006 Fields Medals. were announced at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM).

The Fields Medal, awarded to some (small) number of people every four years at the ICM, is the biggest prize awarded in mathematics. It is given only to people age 40 or younger because it is supposed to go to somebody whose research program is still active.

Four people were awarded Fields medals this year:

Andrei Okounkov "for his contributions bridging probability, representation theory and algebraic geometry"

Grigory Perelman "for his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow" (i.e., for proving the Poincaré conjecture)

Terence Tao "for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory." Basically, he got this for doing lots of stuff in lots of different areas---I guess this is why he got a fields medal and Ben Green didn't yet get one this year; Ben Green's will probably come in 2010. I have heard professors everywhere gush about how brilliant he is; for example, a math prof at Berkeley (who has a bit of an ego) basically talked about him the way many of us have talked about certain fellow Techers. He also said that Terry knows more about a problem after thinking about it for 5 minutes than other researcher mathematicians would know after thinking about it for 2 years.

Wendelin Werner "for his contributions to the development of stochastic Loewner evolution, the geometry of two-dimensional Brownian motion, and conformal field theory"



Cornell computer science professor Jon Kleinberg (who is also brilliant, by the way) won the Nevanlinna prize (see the same press release). He mostly won for his CS work on small-world networks and related stuff.



Kiyoshi Itô won the Gauss prize.



Now, there are some further juicy tidbits to the Fields Medals. In awarding the Fields Medals, IMU President John Ball announced that Perelman declined the prize. There is apparently an NPR interview with Perelman, who is notoriously hard to reach and apparently still lives with his mother. As quoted in the AP report,

John Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, said that he had urged Perelman to accept the medal, but Perelman said he felt isolated from the mathematics community and "does not want to be seen as its figurehead." Ball offered no further details of the conversation.

I hereby promise that if I ever get a Fields Medal that I will not decline the prize. (Not that I'll have any such "moral dilemma" to worry about any time soon...)