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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'.
typos aside,
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.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
> Perelman, Wiles, and most other serious mathematicians like to be left alone.
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.