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2006 Fields Medalists Announced
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'.
how about you shut up, and let the man do what he wants to do.
"I hope that one way or another that guy is able to find happiness."
Perhaps he has.
Perhaps it doesn't involve large amounts of money and the winning of prizes.
Seriously, how often do you meet an average person who's even heard of a Field's medal (say vs the people who've heard of the Nobel)? But now that this story is all over the place, the words Field's medal will enter common vernacular again. BTW, if you read carefully, it sounds like Andrei Okounkov's work is the most interesting of all the nominees. He tied together "Probability"
(<intended pun>probably</intended pun> meaning measure theory), representation theory and algebraic geometry. This is about as cool as cool can get in math.
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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.
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"Only in America" you mean. Slashdot is one of the few places where it might be considered sane.
"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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