You're reading: News

2014 Fields Medals awarded – coverage round-up

Today's most overused Wikimedia Commons image
At this week’s International Congress of Mathematics, in Seoul, Korea, the winners of the 2014 Fields Medal were announced. The medals, which were established in 1936, and are awarded every four years to four different mathematicians, recognise achievement in mathematics research. This year’s winners are (from the ICM website):

  • Artur Avila (CNRS, France & IMPA, Brazil) – whose profound contributions to dynamical systems theory have changed the face of the field, using the powerful idea of renormalization as a unifying principle.
  • Manjul Bhargava (Princeton University, USA) – for developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers and applying them to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves.
  • Martin Hairer (University of Warwick, UK) – for his outstanding contributions to the theory of stochastic partial differential equations, and in particular creating a theory of regularity structures for such equations.
  • Maryam Mirzakhani (Stanford University, USA) – for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.

Here’s a round-up of some of the other Fields Medal coverage:

One of the reasons this news story seems to be basically everywhere today (if you wake up and Sarah Montague is talking to a mathematician about something, you know there’s maths news) is that this is the first time the prize has been awarded to a woman. Given that only around 6% of mathematics professors are female (thanks, Sarah Montague), it’s not surprising it’s taken so long for a woman to achieve the award – and great news. It’s been picked up by a huge number of news outlets, some of which you may not expect to be covering a maths story…

To find out more about the individual winners, here’s a great series of articles by Quanta Magazine/Simons Foundation:

Alex Bellos, over at The Guardian, has posted an explanation of the actual maths involved in each winner’s research, from the International Mathematical Union: Fields Medals 2014: the maths of Avila, Bhargava, Hairer and Mirzakhani explained

And if you’re interested in the Fields Medal in general:

One Response to “2014 Fields Medals awarded – coverage round-up”

(will not be published)

$\LaTeX$: You can use LaTeX in your comments. e.g. $ e^{\pi i} $ for inline maths; \[ e^{\pi i} \] for display-mode (on its own line) maths.

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>