Fields Medals awarded

prostoalex writes "Every four years the Fields Medals are awarded to top mathematicians for outstanding research. This year's winners, as this San Francisco Chronicle article reports are Vladimir Voevodsky from Institute for Advanced Study and Laurent Lafforgue from Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques. 'True to form, Lafforgue and Voevodsky's mathematical research has no known practical applications', notes SF Chronicle."

Comments

Re:No practical applications?

[jfern]

I guess that must have been before the NSA became the largest employer of pure mathematicians in the world.

Re:Arrrgh

[khuber]

Yes, and Stephen Smale, John Nash Jr., and of course Henri Poincaré (father of topology), Moebius, Hausdorff (may be familiar if you've read about fractals), and Riemann are some other mathematicians whose work in or related to topology is interesting.

One thing that's interesting (to me) is how difficult it is to solve something like the Poincaré conjecture which seems so simple at first. It's only been solved for generalized versions where n > 3, and getting down to 4 took a long long time!

Even though I only understand a bit (my math background is applied mathematics), topology is pretty fascinating in an abstract sense. Incredibly brilliant people.

-Kevin

Re:... near equivalents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope not true. Alfred Nobel was never married. Just an urban myth to try and explain why a nobel prize was never awarded in math. Basically the Nobel prize is awarded not to the best researcher in a field per see but to the person in each field whose work has the greatest impact on society, etc. Nobel never thought math was like that.

This is why many of the mathematicians have won their prizes in economics or other areas.. eg: Nash ( Game Theory ), Merton, Scholes ( Black-Scholes equation for options pricing ). Both are fairly simple mathematically but have proven far more useful than say determining that a doughnut and coffee cup are topological equivalents.

Only 2?

[reverseengineer]

I'm really surprised that only two Fields Medals were awarded this time around- at least three have been awarded every four years since 1974. Is Preda Mihailescu's proof of Catalan's Conjecture considered too recent for consideration? I'd think that sort of thing, combined with his work on noted hot topic primality would make him an attractive candidate.
Of course, I'm sure they are many others who were also very deserving as well. No, I am not Dr. Mihailescu, and have never met him in fact; it's just when I saw that the Fields Medals were awarded, my first thought was, "I wonder if they gave one to that guy who proved Catalan's Conjecture?" As recent as the proof was (considering the slow, careful peer review that accompanies important purported mathematical proofs), I wasn't shocked to not see his named- I was far more surprised that the committee chose to not award the remaining two prizes to anyone.