Fields Medals

The obverse side of the Fields Medal

Alfred Nobel did not endow a prize for Mathematics; instead we have the Fields medals. These are awarded to at most four mathematicians under the age of 40  at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), which takes place at four-yearly intervals. (The next Congress will be in St Petersburg in 2022.) The name is in honour of John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician who in 1936 established the award, designed the medal itself and funded the monetary prize (set at 15,000 Canadian dollars since 2006). The medal belonging to Caucher Birkar, one of the four winners at the Rio de Janeiro Congress in 2018, was stolen shortly after the presentation, but happily the International Mathematical Union replaced it a few days later.

At the Royal Society in London last week, Professor Birkar, gave an inspiring talk about his remarkable intellectual journey that began at primary school in a small Kurdish village in Iran, close to the Iraq border, at the time of the Iran-Iraq war, and three decades later reached the highest distinction in his profession with the award of a Fields medal. He describes how the teachers and family members encouraged and inspired him at different stages in his education and shares his experiences as a refugee, finally settling in England, He speaks lovingly of the creativity and beauty he finds in mathematics and of the collegiality he enjoys with fellow mathematicians around the world. He emphasises the value of migration in enriching the human commonwealth and the vital importance of maintaining cultural and linguistic diversity. His talk is both touchingly personal and yet universal in its relevance and appeal. Click the link above to listen to it.