2006 Fields Medals Awarded, Volume 53, Number 9

On August 22, 2006, four Fields Medals were awarded at the opening ceremonies of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Madrid, Spain. The medalists are ANDREI OKOUNKOV, GRIGORY PERELMAN, TERENCE TAO, and WENDELIN WERNER. [Editors Note: During the award ceremony, John Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, announced that Perelman declined to accept the Fields Medal.] The Fields Medals are given every four years by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). Although there is no formal age limit for recipients, the medals have traditionally been presented to mathematicians not older than forty years of age, as an encouragement for future achievement. The medal is named after the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields (1863–1932), who organized the 1924 ICM in Toronto. At a 1931 meeting of the Committee of the International Congress, chaired by Fields, it was decided that funds left over from the Toronto ICM “should be set apart for two medals to be awarded in connection with successive International Mathematical Congresses.” In outlining the rules for awarding the medals, Fields specified that the medals “should be of a character as purely international and impersonal as possible.” During the 1960s, in light of the great expansion of mathematics research, the possible number of medals to be awarded was increased from two to four. Today the Fields Medal is recognized as the world’s highest honor in mathematics. Previous recipients of the Fields Medal are: Lars V. Ahlfors and Jesse Douglas (1936); Laurent Schwartz and Atle Selberg (1950); Kunihiko Kodaira and Jean-Pierre Serre (1954); Klaus F. Roth and René Thom (1958); Lars Hörmander and John W. Milnor (1962); Michael F. Atiyah, Paul J. Cohen, Alexandre Grothendieck, and Stephen Smale (1966); Alan Baker, Heisuke Hironaka, Sergei P. Novikov, and John G. Thompson (1970); Enrico Bombieri and David B. Mumford (1974); Pierre R. Deligne, Charles L. Fefferman, Grigorii A. Margulis, and Daniel G. Quillen (1978); Alain Connes, William P. Thurston, and Shing-Tung Yau (1982); Simon K. Donaldson, Gerd Faltings, and Michael H. Freedman (1986); Vladimir Drinfeld, Vaughan F. R. Jones, Shigefumi Mori, and Edward Witten (1990); Jean Bourgain, Pierre-Louis Lions, Jean-Christoph Yoccoz, and Efim Zelmanov (1994); Richard Borcherds, William Timothy Gowers, Maxim Kontsevich, and Curtis T. McMullen (1998); Laurent Lafforgue and Vladimir Voevodsky (2002).