Great Country Academician

Although it is awarded at the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians, the Gauss Prize does not have a high status in the mathematics community.

This is mainly related to the corresponding field behind the Gauss Prize.

It is awarded to scholars who have made significant contributions to the field of applied mathematics, which is at the bottom of all mathematical fields.

For stubborn and arrogant mathematicians, mathematics should be pure, should be 'useless', and should not be troubled by the world.

There are not a few people who hold this view. In fact, most mathematicians, even those who are famous, such as Hardy, Grothendieck, Perelman, etc., have publicly stated that mathematics should be This is the pure point of view.

This also leads to the low status of applied mathematics in the mathematics community.

But for Xu Chuan, it was quite satisfying to get this medal.

Aside from those medals that require people in their 70s and 80s to win, such as the Chern Prize and the Wolf Prize, he really hopes that he can collect all the famous mathematics awards before he is 30 years old.

After all, his mentor Deligne has won a Grand Slam, so there’s no reason why he can’t collect them all, right?

And this time the Lilavati Award or the Radzhinskaya Award are still very good.

With some stamp-collecting mentality, Xu Chuan returned to his seat with a smile on his face.

The next award was the Chern Mathematics Prize, and the winner was Professor Barry Meage, a mathematician from Harvard University.

This old professor is over 80 years old this year. IMU awarded this medal in recognition of his discoveries and achievements in the fields of topology, arithmetic geometry and number theory, as well as his guidance and selfless dedication in cultivating a new generation of mathematicians.

Subsequently, the Lilavati Award and the Radzhinskaya Award, which Xu Chuan was looking forward to, began to be awarded.

The former was awarded to Professor Nikolai Andreyev of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Tsarist Academy of Sciences.

As for the latter, just when Xu Chuan thought that the Radzhinskaya Award was reserved for him, Chairman Kenig on the reporting stage read out another name.

"The winner of the Radzhinskaya Prize is Professor Gitomirskaya!"

Hearing this name, Xu Chuan glanced at Professor Gitomirskaya who walked up to the lecture table with some surprise. It was not him?

The Radzhinskaya Award is an award established to recognize scholars who have made outstanding contributions in the field of mathematical physics. Given his achievements in mathematical physics, he did not receive this medal?

It’s a bit strange. Apart from the Radzhinskaya Award, the only other awards left are the Fields Medal.

Is it possible that the International Mathematical Union is planning to award the Fields Medal to him again?

But the Fields Medal is different from the Nobel Prize. The former does not reflect contributions to people, while the latter does not reflect contributions to people. Theoretically speaking, a person should only get one Field Medal in his lifetime.

Looking at the award ceremony on the reporting stage, Xu Chuan had some curiosity in his eyes.

Unless he misunderstood what Professor Kenig meant, he should still be able to get another medal today.

But the only medals awarded now are the Fields Medals.

It's interesting. Is it possible that the International Mathematical Union (IMU) is planning to break up and award another Fields Medal to him?

His eyes moved, Xu Chuan looked at the reporting table with interest.

Not urgent.

After the Radzhinskaya Prize was handed out, it was the turn of the final highlight, the Fields Medal.

As the Fields Medal award ceremony began, the atmosphere in the venue was pushed to the highest level, and the warm atmosphere reached its peak.

Xu Chuan, who was sitting in the front row with his back to the venue, could feel that countless pairs of eyes behind him were focused on the reporting table, all looking forward to it enthusiastically.

Facing everyone's anxious gazes, Professor Kenig slowly spoke on the reporting table.

"Algebraic geometry is a subject with a very long history and is also one of the most active areas in mathematics today."

"For introducing the ideas of Hodge theory into combinatorics, he proved the Dowling-Wilson conjecture of geometric lattices, proved the Heron-Rota-Welsh conjecture of matroids, developed Lorentz polynomials, and proved the strong Mersenne conjecture."

"The first scholar to win the Fields Medal was"

"Xu Ji'er from Princeton University!"

The moment the list was announced, warm applause erupted in the lecture hall.

This is probably the most popular winner of this Fields Medal.

If the last Fields Medal in 2018 was a fight between gods, it not only produced top talents like Xu Chuan and Schultz, but also fierce players like Akshay Venkatesh and Kauchel Bilkar. people.

Either this year's Fields Medal will be mediocre.

But mediocrity is relative. Anyone who can win the Fields Medal can be said to be a true genius who is one in a million.

After Xu Ji'er's award ceremony was completed, the winners of the second and third Fields Medal winners were also announced one after another.

Female scholars from Ukraine, Professor Marina Vyazovska, and Professor Hugo Dimini-Copan from the University of Paris-Saclay, received these two Fields Medals.

The announcement of the award is progressing just as Xu Chuan remembered it. The scholars who won the Fields Medal this year seem to be the same people they are familiar with.

There is only one last spot left.

Under the gaze of thousands of pairs of eyes, Professor Kenig took a deep breath, looked at the teleprompter board in his hand, and spoke slowly.

"Function is a subject with a very long history. Its development history can be traced back to the mathematician Euclid in the ancient Greek period. It is one of the most important concepts in all mathematical concepts."

“Looking at the development of the concept of function over the centuries, many mathematicians have continuously given new ideas to the concept of function from the perspectives of sets, algebra, correspondence, and sets, thus promoting the development of the entire mathematics.”

"Among them, there are many great figures in mathematics such as Legendre, Euler, Cauchy, etc. who have conducted in-depth research on the nature and properties of functions and introduced the concepts of continuity and differentiability of functions."

“In the theory of the normal family of holomorphic functions and the normal family of meromorphic functions, seeking new regularity rules is an important mission of functions.”

"Because the scope of the normal family of holomorphic functions and the normal family of meromorphic functions is extended to the holomorphic function family with property p in a region, Bloch's conjecture is solved; and in mathematical physics, the function is greatly expanded and optimized Distribution Algorithms.”

"The last scholar to win the Fields Medal was"

“Amelia Elwin from NTU!”

As the words fell, thunderous applause came like a tide.

In the front row of the lecture hall, Xu Chuan was stunned for a moment after hearing that the last person on the list was unsuccessful, with some surprise on his face, but it soon turned into a smile of relief.

To win the Fields Medal at the age of twenty-six is ​​indeed a miracle.

Although he did not break his own record, it is quite rare at this age.

The only ones approaching this age are Jean-Pierre Serre and Charles Fefferman.

What surprised Xu Chuan even more was not only that Amelia won the last Fields Medal, but also the decision of this session of the Mathematics Council.

This year's International Congress of Mathematicians has unprecedentedly awarded two Fields Medals to women!

You must know that before this, the only female mathematician to win the Fields Medal was Professor Mariam Mirzakhani of Stanford University.

After the death of Professor Mirzakhani in 2017, there are no longer existing female Fields Medal winners in the world.

At first, when he heard that Professor Marina Vyazovska had won the Fields Medal, Xu Chuan thought that Amelia had no hope and would have to wait for another award.

However, the International Mathematical Union made a decision that surprised him and everyone - awarding two Fields Medals to female mathematicians at once!

I have to say that this decision really caught everyone’s attention.

PS: There will be another chapter later, please vote for me!