Fields Medal

From Academic Kids

The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to up to four mathematicians (not over forty years of age) at each International Congress of International Mathematical Union, since 1936 and regularly since 1948 at the initiative of the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields. The purpose is to give recognition and support to young mathematical researchers having already made important contributions.

Year	Location	Winners
2002	Beijing, China	Laurent Lafforgue (France), Vladimir Voevodsky (US)
1998	Berlin, Germany	Richard Ewen Borcherds (GB), William Timothy Gowers (GB), Maxim Kontsevich (Russia), Curtis T. McMullen (US)
1994	Z�rich, Switzerland	Efim Isakovich Zelmanov (Russia), Pierre-Louis Lions (France), Jean Bourgain (Belgium), Jean-Christophe Yoccoz (France)
1990	Kyoto, Japan	Vladimir Drinfeld (USSR), Vaughan Frederick Randal Jones (New-Zeland), Shigefumi Mori (Japan), Edward Witten (US)
1986	Berkeley, California, USA	Simon Donaldson (GB), Gerd Faltings (West Germany), Michael Freedman (US)
1982	Warsaw, Poland	Alain Connes (France) , William Thurston (US), Shing-Tung Yau (US)
1978	Helsinki, Finland	Pierre Deligne (Belgium), Charles Fefferman (US), Grigory Margulis (USSR), Daniel Quillen (US)
1974	Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada	Enrico Bombieri (Italy), David Mumford (US)
1970	Nice, France	Alan Baker (GB), Heisuke Hironaka (Japan), Sergei Petrovich Novikov (USSR), John Griggs Thompson (GB)
1966	Moscow, Russia	Michael Francis Atiyah (GB), Paul Joseph Cohen (US), Alexander Grothendieck (France), Stephen Smale (US)
1962	Stockholm, Sweden	Lars H�rmander (Sweden), John Milnor (US)
1958	Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom	Klaus Roth (GB), Rene Thom (France)
1954	Amsterdam, Netherlands	Kunihiko Kodaira (Japan), Jean-Pierre Serre (France)
1950	Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA	Laurent Schwartz (France), Atle Selberg (Norway)
1936	Oslo, Norway	Lars Ahlfors (Finland), Jesse Douglas (US)

The Fields Medal is often described as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics". The comparison is not very accurate, in particular because the age limit is applied strictly. Fields Medals are awarded for a body of work, rather than for a particular result, though there is clearly consensus that some individual theorems can and should be recognised in this way. (That is not to say that some awards from the past have not been in some ways contentious or controversial—they have.) Since the institution of the Wolf Prizes, there has been a high-profile "lifetime achievement" award in mathematics; this has to some extent redressed perceived imbalances in the weight given to different kinds of merit and the movements of intellectual fashion across mathematics as a whole.

The medal is mentioned a number of times in the award winning movie Good Will Hunting staring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

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