Fields medals awarded to four

The 2006 recipients of the Fields Medal—considered by mathematicians around the world to be equivalent to the Nobel Prize—were named in August at the International Congress of Mathematicians during a ceremony in Madrid. The International Mathematical Union awards the honors every four years to mathematicians under 40.

For the first time in the prestigious prize’s 40-year history, one of this year’s recipients turned down the medal and $9500 purse and declined to attend the August ceremony. Grigori Perelman, whose work may have resolved two outstanding problems in topology, the Poincaré conjecture and the Thurston geometrization conjecture, refused the prize after receiving a personal visit and invitation to the ceremony from Sir John Ball, IMU president. Perelman, who last December left his job of some years as a researcher at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in St. Petersburg, Russia, had been named as a recipient of the medal “for his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow,” according to the award citation.

The other three recipients, who accepted their awards and attended the ceremony, are as follows.

Wendelin Werner, professor of mathematics at the Université de Paris–Sud and at the École Normale Supérieure, also in Paris, received the medal “for his contributions to the development of stochastic Loewner evolution, the geometry of two-dimensional Brownian motion, and conformal field theory.”

Andrei Okounkov, a mathematics professor at Princeton University, was named “for his contributions bridging probability representation theory and algebraic geometry.”

Terence Tao, who won the medal “for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis, and additive number theory,” is a mathematics professor at UCLA.