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'.

Comments

He refused the Fields Medal?

[theskipper]

Something doesn't add up here.

Re:He refused the Fields Medal?

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

"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.

Of course he declined the medal

[eln]

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.

Re:Of course he declined the medal

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Once, when I was trying to setup a router for my shared flat I got in a little over my head (what with the DHCP and all, I'm not that smart) and accidentally proved the Poincare conjecture.

There's something to be said...

[Lord Aurora]

...about a guy who refuses the Fields Medal because he "doesn't want to be seen as a figurehead."

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.

Re:I-Like-WHAT?

[stevesliva]

Am I the only one who read Zonk's tagline and saw "I like meth"?

You're the only on who read Zonk's tagline.

International Congress of Mathematicians

[Anonymous Coward]

International Congress of Mathematicians... I bet that conference is a BABE-fest!!!

Wikipedia entry for Terence

[alienfluid]

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.

Re:Wikipedia entry for Terence

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to Terrence's website on Standford and looked over his classes and homework assignments and I didn't understand ANYTHING. I guess that's what you get for taking a leet professor in a leet college.

Given that Terence's name is not Terrence, that Stanford is not spelled Standford, and that he is a professor at UCLA, not Stanford, is it surprising that you didn't undertand ANYTHING?

Re:Wikipedia entry for Terence

[colmore]

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.

As is obvious to even the most casual observer...

[swillden]

... 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.

Perelman is not the first ....

[dildo]

... 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.

Re:Perelman is not the first ....

[mathcam]

> 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.

Re:Maybe he just doesn't want the prize?

[CopaceticOpus]

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.