2018 Fields Medal awarded to one of the youngest mathematicians among others
On August 1, the International Mathematical Union announced the winners of one the most prestigious prizes in mathematics, the Fields Medal. Awarded every four years, it is bestowed on mathematicians 40 years old or younger for their contribution to mathematics. The winners are honored in an international gathering that is attended by the brightest minds from the field of mathematics. The award is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in mathematics.”
The winners of this year’s Fields Medal are:
1. Peter Scholze, 30, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bonn, Germany, is one of the youngest mathematicians to be awarded this prize. Scholze is a number theorist who has worked extensively on ‘p-adic fields,’ and focuses on the intersection of geometry and number theory. It was widely speculated that he would be one of the winners. Peter Woit, a professor at Columbia University, says that Scholze is “by far the most talented arithmetic geometer of his generation.”
2. Caucher Birkar, 40, of the University of Cambridge in England, specializes in algebraic geometry. He was recognized “for his proof of the boundedness of fano varieties and for contributions to the minimal model program.” Birkar grew up in a Kurdish city in Iran that was heavily affected by the war between Iran and Iraq, and later moved to the U.K. He hopes that his recognition would “put a little smile on the lips” of the world’s 40 million Kurds.
3. Akshay Venkatesh, 36, who works at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Stanford University in California, was awarded the Fields Medal prize for his work on number theory. “He is among the few mathematicians who have made substantial progress on a question formulated by Carl Friedrich Gauss in the 1800s,” mentions an article in Nature.
4. Alessio Figalli, 34, who works at the Swiss Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, specializes in a field known as optimal transport. He is a network analysis researcher who studies the best ways to distribute goods on a network. Figalli states that his area of research “has applications not only in economics, but also […] in several other areas, such as, for instance, meteorology.”
Congratulations to all the winners!
More about the Fields Medal prize: The prize was founded by Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields and was awarded for the first time in the year 1932. Each winner receives a gold medal and a cash prize worth $11,500.
References:
- Former refugee among winners of Fields medal – the 'Nobel prize for maths'
- Fields Medals Awarded to 4 Mathematicians
- Number-theory prodigy among winners of most coveted prize in mathematics
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Published on: Aug 06, 2018
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