Math Forum Discussions - Countdown to the 2010 Fields medal(s)

Date: Jul 27, 2010 12:50 AM
Author: Jean-Claude Evard
Subject: Countdown to the 2010 Fields medal(s)

The Fields medals, the Nevanlinna prize, the Gauss prize, and the Chern prize of 2010 will be awarded on Thursday, August 19, 2010, at the opening ceremony of the 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM2010) that will be held in Hyderabad, in India, from Thursday, August 19, to Friday, August 27, 2010. 

This congress and the awards of these medals and prizes are organized by the International Mathematical Union. 

The winners of those medals and prizes are already informed about their winning, so that they can prepare themselves to attend the congress and give lectures there. The names of the winners are kept secret to the general public until the opening ceremony.

Below are the following pieces of information about this huge event:

01. The International Mathematical Union.
02. The 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians
03. Presentation of the Fields medals and prizes
04. General schedule
05. Presentation of the work of the winners
06. Lectures of the winners
07. Reasons for choosing India
08. History of the International Mathematical Union
09. A book on the International Mathematical Union
10. The executive committee of the International Mathematical Union
11. History of the International Congresses of Mathematicians
12. A new book on the history of the International Congresses of Mathematicians
13. The Fields medal
14. The Nevanlinna prize
15. The Carl Friedrich Gauss prize
16. The Chern prize
17. The city of Hyderabad
18. The General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union
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1. The International Mathematical Union
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The International Mathematical Union (IMU) organizes the International Congresses of Mathematicians and the awards of the Fields medals, the Nevanlinna prizes, the Gauss prizes, and the Chern prizes. For more information about the IMU, see the following Web pages:

http://www.mathunion.org/

http://www.icm2010.org.in/imu-prizes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mathematical_Union

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/prize-committee-chairs/2010/
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2. The 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians
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The 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM2010) will be held in Hyderabad, in India, from Thursday, August 19, to Friday, August 27, 2010. For more information about this congress, see the following Web pages:

http://www.mathunion.org/activities/icm

http://www.icm2010.org.in/

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100401/jsp/nation/story_12290262.jsp

http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news-president-of-india-to-inaugurate-mathematical-meet-070810.aspx

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/i-ico052110.php
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3. Presentation of the Fields medals and prizes
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The president of India, President Shrimati Prathibha Patil, will present the Fields medals, the Nevanlinna prize, the Gauss prize, and the Chern prize at the opening ceremony of the 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians. For more information, see the following Web pages:

http://www.icm2010.org.in/wp-content/icmfiles/uploads/ICM_President.pdf

http://www.hindu.com/2010/07/05/stories/2010070560621200.htm
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4. General schedule
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The general schedule of the 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians is posted on the following Web page:

http://www.icm2010.org.in/scientific-program/schedule-of-icm2010
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5. Presentation of the work of the winners
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The schedule of the first two days of the 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians, devoted to the winners of the Fields medals, the Nevanlinna prize, the Gauss prize, and the Chern prize is the following:

Thursday, August 19, 2010, Day 1:
09:30-12:30: Opening Ceremony, awards of the Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna prize, the Gauss prize, and the Chern prize of 2010:
14:00-14:25: Work of Fields Medallist 1
14:30-14:55: Work of Fields Medallist 2
15:00-15:25: Work of Fields Medallist 3
15:30-15-55: Work of Fields Medallist 4
16:00-16:25: Work of Nevanlinna prize Winner

Friday, August 20, 2010, Day 2:
09:30-09:35: Welcome by President L. Lovasz, President of the International Mathematical Union
10:35-11:20: Lecture on the work of the Chern prize winner.
11:45-12:30: Lecture on the work of the Gauss prize winner.

For more information about the schedule of the first two days of the 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians, see the following Web page:

http://www.icm2010.org.in/wp-content/icmfiles/docs/schedule/programme_jul2.pdf
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6. Lectures of the winners
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The schedule of the lectures of the winners of the Fields medals, the Nevanlinna prize, the Gauss prize, and the Chern prize, and the plenary lectures of the 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians, is posted on the following Web page:

http://www.icm2010.org.in/wp-content/icmfiles/docs/schedule/programme_jul2.pdf
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7. Reasons for choosing India
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The reasons given by the International Mathematical Union for choosing India to host the 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians are the following:

1. India has a long history of engagement with mathematics. Ancient India had made impressive progress in Algebra.

2. The place value system with the use of zero for representing numbers is an Indian invention. 

3. Mathematicians working in Kerala (in the South West of India) had anticipated many ideas that lie at the base of Calculus, some two centuries before Newton. 

4. In the more recent past, in the twentieth century, Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan and Harish-Chandra blazed new trails in mathematics. 

Pieces of information about Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan extracted from Wikipedia Encyclopedia:

Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan, 22 December 1887 - 26 April 1920, was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, and under the worst possible living conditions, made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions. A famous Ramanujan conjecture is an assertion on the size of the tau function, which has as generating function the discriminant modular form Delta(q), a typical cusp form in the theory of modular forms. It was finally proven in 1973, as a consequence of Pierre Deligne's proof of the Weil conjectures. The reduction step involved is complicated. Deligne won a Fields Medal in 1978 for his work on Weil conjectures. While still in India, Ramanujan recorded the bulk of his results in four notebooks of loose leaf paper. Ramanujan is generally hailed as an all-time great like Leonhard Euler, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, for his natural mathematical genius. G. H. Hardy quotes: "The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was...". Hardy went on to claim that his greatest contribution to mathematics was discovering Ramanujan.

Pieces of information about Harish-Chandra extracted from Wikipedia Encyclopedia:

Harish-Chandra was influenced by the mathematicians Hermann Weyl and Claude Chevalley. From 1950 to 1963 he was at Columbia University and carried out some of his best research, especially on representations of semisimple Lie groups. During this period he established as his special area the study of the discrete series representations of semisimple Lie groups, which are the closest analogue of the Peter-Weyl theory in the non-compact case. The methods were formidable and inductive, using Lie group decompositions. He is known for work with Armand Borel founding the theory of arithmetic groups; and for papers on finite group analogues. He enunciated a philosophy of cusp forms, a precursor of the Langlands philosophy. He was a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey from 1963.

For more information about the reasons for choosing India, see the following Web page from the Web site of the 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians:

http://www.icm2010.org.in/

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Web pages about Indian mathematics:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_mathematics

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Indexes/Indians.html

http://www.storyofmathematics.com/indian.html

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Web pages about Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Ramanujan.html

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Ramanujan.html

http://www.usna.edu/Users/math/meh/ramanujan.html

http://www.springer.com/mathematics/numbers/journal/11139

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Web pages about Harish-Chandra:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harish-Chandra

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Harish-Chandra.html

See also the following book:
The Mathematical Legacy of Harish-Chandra: 
A Celebration of Representation Theory and Harmonic Analysis
Edited by: Robert S. Doran and V. S. Varadarajan
American Mathematical Society, 2000; 549 pp; hardcover
ISBN-10: 0-8218-1197-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-8218-1197-9
List Price: US$122
http://www.ams.org/bookstore-getitem/item=PSPUM-68
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Legacy-Harish-Chandra-Celebration-Representation/dp/0821811975
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8. History of the International Mathematical Union
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The International Mathematical Union (IMU) was founded during the International Congress of Mathematicians in Strasbourg on September 20, 1920. It was dissolved in September 1932, and back to official existence on September 10, 1951. See the following two Web pages on the Web site of the IMU for more information on the history of the IMU:

http://www.mathunion.org/general/history

http://www.mathunion.org/publications/bulletins/archive/no-39-december-1995/imu-past-and-present/

See also this history of John Charles Fields, which is very much related to the early history of the International Mathematical Union:

http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/aboutus/jcfields/
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9. A book on the International Mathematical Union
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Professor Olli Lehto, former Secretary of International Mathematical Union (IMU) from 1983 to 1990, has written the following book on the history of the IMU: 

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Mathematics Without Borders
A History of the International Mathematical Union
Olli Lehto
XVI, 399 pages, 57 illustrations, Hardcover 
Springer, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-387-98358-5
$62.95
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http://www.springer.com/mathematics/book/978-0-387-98358-5

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Without-Borders-International-Mathematical/dp/0387983589/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2
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Here are some pieces of information from the book of Olli Lehto posted on the above Web page of amazon.com:

The first International Congress of Mathematics (ICM) was held in Zurich in 1897, while the International Mathematical Union (IMU) was founded in 1920. The book is a history of international cooperation in mathematics in the twentieth century, which parallels the political history of the same period. The International Mathematical Union, founded in the aftermath of World War I, for its first fifteen years of existence, excluded Germany and the other defeated Central Powers. But later, the IMU embraced principles of political neutrality.
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10. The executive committee of the International Mathematical Union
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The members of the executive committee of the International Mathematical Union from 2007 to 2010 are the following:

President: László Lovász (Hungary)
Secretary: Martin Grötschel (Germany)
Vice Presidents: Zhi-Ming Ma (China) and Claudio Procesi (Italy)
Members at Large: 
M. Salah Baouendi (USA)
Manuel de León (Spain) 
Ragni Piene (Norway) 
Cheryl E. Praeger (Australia) 
Victor A. Vassiliev (Russia)
Marcelo Viana (Brazil)
Ex officio, past President: John M Ball (United Kingdom)

For more information, see the following Web page:

http://www.mathunion.org/organization/ec/ec-2007-2010/
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11. History of the International Congresses of Mathematicians
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For the history of the International Congresses of Mathematicians, see the following Web page on the Web site of the Wikipedia Encyclopedia:
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Congress_of_Mathematicians

See also this history of John Charles Fields, which is very much related to the early history of the International Congresses of Mathematicians:

http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/aboutus/jcfields/
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12. A new book on the history of the International Congresses of Mathematicians
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The following new book contains a history of the first twenty-five International Congresses of Mathematicians, from 1897 to 2006:

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Mathematicians of the World, Unite! 
The International Congress of Mathematicians?A Human Endeavor 
Guillermo Curbera 
Hardcover, 344 pages
AK Peters, 2009 
ISBN-10: 1568813309 
ISBN-13: 978-1568813301
$59.00
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For more information about this book, see the following Web pages:

http://www.akpeters.com/product.asp?ProdCode=3301

http://www.akpeters.com/author.asp?ID=2108

http://www.akpeters.com/pdf/Curbera_AustMS_Mar2010.pdf

http://www.akpeters.com/pdf/Curbera_MathematicalReviews_12-2009.pdf

http://www.akpeters.com/pdf/Curbera_ChoiceMag_12-2009.pdf

http://www.akpeters.com/pdf/Curbera_ZentralblattMATH_10-2009.pdf
http://www.lms.ac.uk/newsletter/385/385_10.html

http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/19/?pa=reviews&sa=viewBookPF&bookId=69920

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-World-Unite-International-Congress/dp/1568813309/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1
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13. The Fields medals
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The Fields medals are awarded at the opening ceremonies of the International Congresses of Mathematicians, which are held every four years. At most four Fields medals, that is 0 or 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 Fields medals, are awarded at each of these congresses. For more information about the Fields medals, see the following Web pages: 

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/fields/details/

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/fields/prizewinners/

http://www.icm2010.org.in/imu-prizes

http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/aboutus/jcfields/fields_medal.html

http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/aboutus/jcfields/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FieldsMedal.html

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Societies/FieldsMedal.html

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Fields.html

http://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Fields/barnesmscthesis-about_Fields.pdf
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14. The Nevanlinna prize
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For information about the Nevanlinna prize, see the following Web pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevanlinna_Prize

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/nevanlinna/details/

http://www.icm2010.org.in/imu-prizes

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/nevanlinna/prize-winners/
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15. The Carl Friedrich Gauss prize
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For information about the Carl Friedrich Gauss prize, see the following Web pages: 

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/gauss/details/

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/gauss/statutes/

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/gauss/medal-interpretation/

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/gauss/portrait/

http://www.icm2010.org.in/imu-prizes
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16. The Chern prize
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For information about the new Chern prize, see the following Web pages: 

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/chern/details/

http://www.mathunion.org/general/prizes/chern/medal-interpretation/

http://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Prizes/Chern/Chern_MedalPress_Release_090601.pdf

http://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Prizes/Chern/Chern_Medal_Program_Guidelines.pdf

http://www.icm2010.org.in/wp-content/icmfiles/docs/Chern_Medal_Press_Release_090601.pdf

http://www.icm2010.org.in/imu-prizes 

http://www.ams.org/notices/200205/people.pdf
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17. The city of Hyderabad
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For information about the city of Hyderabad, see the following Web pages:

http://www.icm2010.org.in/about-icm-2010/hyderabad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyderabad,_India

http://www.hyderabad.org.uk/
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18. The General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union
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For information about the General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union, see the following Web page on the Web site of the 26-th International Congress of Mathematicians:

http://www.icm2010.org.in/imu-general-assembley-2010
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Do all of the above links work?

Are there any other interesting Web pages related to this huge event?