Two More Days

[R.D. Silverman]

...... until the Fields Medal announcement...........

Place your bets.

[CRGreathouse]

Helfgott, maybe? Is Van Vu young enough? Ken Ono and Tom Zhang are too old.

[Batalov]

I was recently reading up on George C. Scott and found that he repeatedly snubbed the Academy (three times?):

In a letter to the Motion Picture Academy he stated that he didn't feel himself to be in competition with other actors. Regarding the second rejection of the Academy Award, Scott famously said elsewhere, "The whole thing is a goddamn meat parade. I don't want any part of it."

So, Grigori Perelman's views on awards and prizes were not unique.

OT: No bets.

[Batalov]

Elsewhere, there's already 1556 votes:

[rajula]

I don't think I will get it this year...

There are many good candidates, but I don't really see "obvious winners". Hence I just to throw something pseudo-random here: this year they go to Bhargava, Hairer, Helfgott and Mirzakhani. Strong young mathematicians like Avila, Figalli and Venkatesh might get it already, but will do so probably later.

[CRGreathouse]

Maryam Mirzakhani looks like a good candidate (but I wouldn't have thought of her without Batlov's link).

[paulunderwood]

Originally Posted by CRGreathouse

Maryam Mirzakhani looks like a good candidate (but I wouldn't have thought of her without Batlov's link).

Good guess

[rajula]

Three out of four correct. I'd say my guess was good also.

[ewmayer]

Missed this thread until doing a search for pre-existing FM posts just now -

Originally Posted by rajula

Three out of four correct. I'd say my guess was good also.

Indeed, most impressive. Here is link/snip/comment I prepared earlier today:

Fields Medal mathematics prize won by woman for first time in its history: Maryam Mirzakhani, who was born and raised in Iran, has been awarded the highest honour a mathematician can attain

Most of the problems Mirzakhani works on involve geometric structures on surfaces and their deformations. She has a particular interest in hyperbolic planes, which can look like the edges of curly kale leaves, but may be easier to crochet than explain. According to a citation released by the International Mathematical Union, Mirzakhani won the prize for her "outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".

Hairer won for his "outstanding contributions to the theory of stochastic partial differential equations", which contain terms that are inherently random. At school, he created audio software that he marketed as "the Swiss army knife of sound editing".

Avila was honoured for his "profound contributions to dynamical systems". Bhargava won for "developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers", including elliptic curves used in cryptography.

Mirzakhani cites Gauss as a childhood inspiration, so the geometry of surfaces is fitting. (Although is is had to find a major area of Maths in which Guass did not make fundamental contributions, his work in geometry, as embodied by his famous Theorema Egregium, is my personal favorite).