Talk:Fields Medal

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Affiliation

For consistency, if the nationality is removed because of lack of importance (with which I agree), the subsection "Affiliation" in the "Demographics of recipients" should be removed too. It is just a section for publicity of an institution without any relation to the Fields Medal. The text says "41 are mathematicians who have been affiliated with the IAS as some point in their career". We can see for example that among the 41, we have Martin Hairer which was at IAS from March to April 2014. He received the Fields medal for his work published much before 2014. Cédric Villani is also considered while he was there only during spring 2009...

That section is little relevant to Fields medal and should be kept in the wiki page of the institution. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 102.103.252.48 (talk) 09:19, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

I agree, I have removed the promotional section. If that material should go anywhere here (and I think it shouldn't) it should go on the IAS's wikipage. Gumshoe2 (talk) 19:06, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

@Gumshoe2: (Note: did not see above discussion, now moved to the bottom of talk page.) I'm inclined to dispute the removal of the "Affiliation" section. 41 out of 56 is quite a high percentage, more than could be explained simply by chance or as promotional. I would say it was promotional if it was, e.g., 10 out of 56, but this is probably higher than any other institution. It would require care to state it in the right way. Do you think that the affiliation of past winners is noteworthy for the article? 2nd/3rd opinions welcome. Caleb Stanford (talk) 19:38, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

IAS is an institution that a very large number of mathematicians visit at some point in their career, because of the special nature of the institute, which is largely based around temporary visitors. It is not analogous to, say, a tally for Harvard or Stanford; it would be if only permanent IAS members were counted. This was also pointed out in a remark earlier today by an IP address on this talk page (improperly added to top of talk page), where it was noted that the tally includes (for instance) mathematicians who were at IAS for a single month. Besides, the only source given is from IAS itself and I do not believe there is any other source showing that anyone else considers the number of IAS affiliations of Fields medalists to be notable. Gumshoe2 (talk) 19:46, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Oh, I see, not sure how I missed that. I've moved it now to the bottom and merged the two sections. OK. Is there anything else useful that could go under Demographics? Perhaps a comparison of permanent affiliation, not including temporary visits? Especially if there are references discussing that. Else, do you have a better suggestion for where the discussion of gender should be placed? Caleb Stanford (talk) 20:02, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Affiliation comparison should not be added if it is original research, which I think it would likely inevitably have to be.

In my opinion, until the gender sentence is expanded appropriately, it should be moved into the Landmarks section (where it already appears in part). But I think others such as David Eppstein strongly believe that it should remain as a standalone section. On the other hand, some of the landmarks section is clearly demographical in nature and could probably be moved to a demographics section. Gumshoe2 (talk) 20:18, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Mirzakhani clearly belongs in landmarks as the first woman medalist. I am less convinced that Viazovska does, so now after she has won the choice of separately discussing women winners seems stronger. There is a small but consistent group of usually-anonymous editors who think that any recognition of diversity is inappropriate in mathematics and should be removed altogether; my opposition is more to them than to any fixed choice of how we organize that material. But I am also a little irritated that whenever you think there is disagreement about some position you pick on me as your imaginary straw-opponent, and put opinions in my mouth that might be less nuanced than my actual opinions, as you recently did at WT:WPM re 177 (number) and now again here. Argue based on content, not based on ad hominems about who might agree or disagree with you. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:34, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

I really do apologize since that is not my goal at all. For instance in this message I consciously chose to frame it as only what I think you believe, and I thought the purpose was clearly just to indicate that I have only one opinion among many (and to be honest I have no idea how it could be interpreted as ad hominem, of all things). In future I'll be more conscious to just refer to opinion of generic "other people" when appropriate, as would have been in this case. Gumshoe2 (talk) 16:04, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

IAS

List of Fields medalists affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study was merged into this article on 7 July 2022. The consensus seems to be to redirect the list to this article in order to preserve the attribution history. But adding the contents of the list to this article was not done. We probably need to discuss whether to add the contents of the list to this article. -- SilverMatsu (talk) 00:19, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Age of medalists

Since the age of medalists is occasionally a topic of interest, e.g. Jean-Pierre Serre, the 1954 Congress medalist is the youngest at 27, is there any interest in adding a column to the medalist table, age at 1 January of congress year (which is one of the qualifications) ?

I calculated the ages to address a citation needed comment, so I have that info currently available. Turtlens (talk) 20:09, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

In my opinion it would be a bad addition, needless information. I've also removed the new sentence about Peter Scholze's age relative to Simon Donaldson's, which seems like original research and is of dubious notability. I've restored the citation needed tag for Serre, since it is necessary to have a reference to establish notability; it is not enough to calculate everyone's ages yourself. Gumshoe2 (talk) 18:14, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

I found a source for Serre being youngest. Additional calculations such as that should only be added if sourced. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:22, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Back story

What was the source of the money? In 1924 the International Congress of Mathematicians came to Toronto. The event was extended by a cross-country train trip to Vancouver and ferry to Victoria. Among the attendees was Ludwik Silberstein and family. The massive volumes to preserve the mathematicians' work dwarfs the volumes published for other ICM meetings. Evidently the conference ran a surplus and Fields held the sum until he discharged it in his will to establish the Medals.

What made the 1924 meeting so grand? Silberstein issued his second edition of The Theory of Relativity in 1924 to compete with Eddington's Mathematical Theory of Relativity. Both books explicated general relativity which had gained adherents after the 1919 Solar Eclipse Expeditions supported the new cosmology of Einstein. Silberstein's 1914 edition, on special relativity, had used biquaternions to elucidate the transformation geometry of the "flat cosmology" of Minkowski space. Southern Ontario had been home to Alexander Macfarlane (Chatham, Ontario) who had presided over an international, special interest group concerned with hypercomplex numbers. Thus the 1924 ICM was a portal out of abstraction into the physical cosmos with its temporal dimension accommodated. Rgdboer (talk) 01:17, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

'Final award'

The infobox has this as 2022, which implies that there won't be any future awards. Shouldn't it say "most recent" or "latest"? YFB ¿ 22:20, 6 July 2025 (UTC)

I agree that this sounds weird. To be consistent with the Nobel, Abel, Shaw and Wolf prizes this could simply be removed altogether. Hairer (talk) 20:06, 7 July 2025 (UTC)