2010 Fields Medals

This is the year of the Fields Medals -- Mathematic's equivalent of the Nobel Prizes, except you have to be  under 40 yrs old to win.

(That's got to be a big smack in the face for older mathematicians.)

2 to 4 people usually win.

They will be announced in a few days, on Aug 19th at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2010 at Hyderabad, India, at 6 am GMT (that's 8/18 11 pm PDT, or 8/19 2 am EDT). The ceremony is supposed to be streamed live.  

Here's an article I wrote for Salon.com about the Fields Medal winners in 2002.

Here's a list of past winners. There are a lot of names on there you ought to recognize:

• John Milnor, 1962 (Sidenote: Mm 2nd summer in graduate school, I housesat in Milnor's wife's house in Stony Brook. She didn't know me, as I was leasing from someone who was leasing from her, and he certainly did not know me, though I looked glowingly at many of their math books on their bookshelf. But mostly I tried to get home each night in time to watch the Nightly Business Report. I was really into the stock market back then -- a few of my grad school friends made a killing (about 300%) on Adobe Systems, all because my friend Tom liked their manuals. I made enough money in the stock market in the '80s to buy my first car.)
• Michael Atiyah, 1966
• Grothendieck, 1966
• Alain Connes, 1982
• Gerd Faltings, 1986
• Edward Witten (of course), 1990
• Grigori Perelman, 2006 -- he proved Poincare's Conjecture, and has famously rejected a $1M prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute
• Terry Tao, UCLA (2006) -- he has a blog here.

The Fields Medals announcements are notorious for leaking early. I've been asking around, and here's what I've been able to come up with:

• Ngô Bảo Châu -- Vietnamese; now is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Semi-human (he obtained his PhD at age 25) he solved the fundamental lemma proposed by Robert Langlands for the case of unitary groups. (Here is an article from Time magazine about it that explains nothing.)
• Other than Ngo, I've only heard speculations about Mikhail Khovanov from Columbia University....

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