Every four years, the brightest and youngest mathematicians are honoured with the Fields Medal, often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics.
This year, the recipients were announced on August 1 at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This year’s winners are Indian-Australian mathematician Akshay Venkatesh; Caucher Birkar of the University of Cambridge in England; Alessio Figalli of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich; and Peter Scholze, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bonn, who at the age of 30, is among of the youngest recipients ever. The youngest winner, Jean-Pierre Serre in 1954, was 27.
Besides the medal, each recipient receives a prize money of 15,000 Canadian dollars (Rs 7.8 lakh).
The Fields Medals are awarded every four years to the most promising mathematicians under the age of 40. At least two, and usually four, people are honoured every time the award is given out. It was inaugurated in 1932 at the request of Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, who ran the 1924 Mathematics Congress in Toronto. In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani of Stanford University became the first woman ever to receive a Fields Medal. She died of cancer in 2017.
Refugee among winners
Caucher Birkar grew up on a farm in Kurdistan Province, near the Iran-Iraq border. After studying mathematics at the University of Tehran, he shifted to the UK in 2000 and started his PhD after a year when he was granted refugees status. He then became a British citizen.
“When I was in school it was a chaotic period, there was the war between Iran and Iraq and the economic situation was pretty bad,” Birkar told the Guardian. “My parents are farmers, so I spent a huge amount of time actually doing farming. In many ways it was not the ideal place for a kid to get interested in something like mathematics.”
Birkar picked up the award for his work on polynomial equations. According to a profile in Quanta magazine, “Birkar has helped bring order to the infinite variety of polynomial equations – those equations that consist of different variables raised to various powers. No two equations are exactly alike, but Birkar has helped reveal that many can be neatly categorised into a small number of families.”
He told Quanta that while growing up, his maths club in Tehran had pictures of Fields Medal winners lining the walls.
Not long after leaving the stage upon receding the 14-carat gold medal, Birkar reported that it had been stolen from his briefcase. When he noticed his case was missing, he alerted security staff. The briefcase was eventually found but his medal and wallet were missing.
Scholze, the youngest of the four, picked his accolade for his work using shapes to solve polynomial equations and has been hailed for “changing the face of arithmetic geometry” and being “a rare talent which only emerges every few decades”.
According to the New York Times, when Scholze was in graduate school, he received attention when he simplified a complex 288-page proof to a minimalistic 37 pages. According to one profile, he managed to resolve fundamental questions in arithmetic algebraic geometry that had remained unsolved for decades. “This is especially true of his proof of the so-called Langlands conjecture for p-adic local bodies. His theory of so-called perfectoid spaces has dramatically expanded the spectrum of methods in mathematics,” the profile notes.
Venkatesh, 36, who currently teaches at Stanford University, won his share of the prize “for his profound contributions to a broad range of subjects in mathematics” – number theory, arithmetic geometry, topology, automorphic forms and ergodic theory.
From being a child prodigy to becoming one of the most renowned researchers in the field of mathematics, Venkatesh’s research has been recognised with many awards, including the Ostrowski Prize and the Infosys Prize.
He and his family moved to Perth in Australia when he was two years old. At the age of 13, he became the youngest person to study at the University of Western Australia and eventually earned his PhD at the age of 20.
According to a profile of him in Quanta magazine, titled ‘A Number Theorist Who Bridges Math and Time’, “Most mathematicians struggle to describe the full range of Venkatesh’s diverse mathematical contributions, which build bridges from number theory to distant fields such as algebraic topology and dynamical systems. He is known for moving into an area of mathematics, transforming it, and then moving on.”
‘A refined understanding’
Alessio Figalli, the winner from Italy, was recognised for his work in the field of optimal transport.
“Given a certain transportation cost, what is the cheapest way to transport a distribution of mass from one place to another?” Figalli told Live Science in an interview in 2013. “This problem has applications not only in economics, but also (more surprisingly) in several other areas, such as, for instance, meteorology.”
“He has gone on to shake the venerable mathematical discipline of analysis, which concerns the properties of certain types of equations. Figalli’s results have provided a refined mathematical understanding of everything from the shape of crystals to weather patterns, to the way ice melts in water,” Quanta magazine wrote in an article.
With inputs from PTI.