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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'.
Am I the only one who read Zonk's tagline and saw "I like meth"?
Fixed link for Terence Tao
Something doesn't add up here.
I think Perelman declined the medal because his solution was so obvious. I mean, who among us hasn't proven those theorems while eating a donut and idly scribbling on our napkins?
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.
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.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
International Congress of Mathematicians... I bet that conference is a BABE-fest!!!
... if it meant wearing scarves with your tweed jacket every frickin' day of the year, like that insufferable professor in "Good Will Hunting." He won the Fields, too.
--- I stand corrected ---
By refusing the award, Grigory Perelman is actually turning himself into an even more notable figure than if he'd just accept it quietly.
It is said that Diogenes once walked into Plato's home and starting stamping around on his carpets, yelling:
"I trample on the pride of Plato."
Plato is said to have looked at him and responded:
"Yes, with a pride of your own."
KFG
Way to make me feel dumb.
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.
... 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.
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... to refuse a major math prize. Alexander Grothendieck also won the Fields medal but turned down the Crafoord price, a similar but less prestigious award for mathematical achievement.
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.
He was a child prodidy growing up, see my other post for a link to his Wikipedia page.
I don't know why you concluded I have an American money-is-everything attitude. My point was that by refusing this award, he makes a bigger deal out of himself and out of the whole situation. If he doesn't care about the award, he should just accept it quietly. He could send his regrets that he is unable to attend the ceremony if he doesn't want to go.
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.
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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