On August 20th, at the ICM held in Beijing, Fields Medals were awarded to Vladimir Voevodsky and Laurent Lafforgue. At the same time, the Nevanlinna Prize was received by Madhu Sudan. The first remarkable thing is that only two Fields Medals were given, whereas, ever since 1966, four or (on two occasions) three medals were awarded. This seems to be the (only) reaction from the IMU to the recent scandals regarding the Fields Medals. It seems that by giving prices to just two (assumedly indisputable) candidates the IMU tries to clean up the prices. If this were the case, the reaction of the IMU to past events would be to punish future candidates. In that way, instead of sending out the (intended) message that the prices could and should be cleaned up, they would be sending the message that anything goes, since past misbehaviours will be paid by future candidates. There is obviously another possible explanation, and that would be that there were only two suitable candidates. If this were the case, that would be a reason of worry for all the mathematical community, since that would mean that we are failing to produce interesting mathematics.

Those two prices do not lack political `savoir faire', though. With just two awardees they have succeeded to content the three mathematical schools that have existed recently. Lafforgue is a representative of the French mathematical school, not only because he is French, but also because he has studied at the ENS and is working at the IHES. On the other hand, Voevodsky is of Russian origin, thus contenting the leading representatives of the late Russian mathematical school. At the same time he received his Ph.D. from Harvard and has worked in the States ever since then, and hence is (according to the thankfully liberal American criteria) a (distinguished) member of the American mathematical school. With such a support, hardly anyone would dare to allow himself to publicly criticise this decision of the IMU.

As far as I know, this time the election has been fair. This does not mean much, since I have little information on how the election was made. If fact, very few information has been available with respect to this ICM, and in particular with respect to the associated FM, especially if one compares it to Berlin's. Whether this lack is information is attributable to the fact that China is a developing country, or to the fact that it is a country that limits freedom of information of any kind, or to that the IMU wanted a low-profile congress, or to any combination of these and other facts, I can not tell. In any case someone should say to the organizers that pictures of `President Jiang' (a dictator) are no substitute for good information. And someone should say to the IMU that supporting a regime that is against freedom is supporting a regime that is against science as we understand it (and it is unethical, in case you care).

This is not the place for a long exposition of the merits of each awardee, but I will make a few comments on their careers.

Vladimir Voevodski got his B.S. from Moscow State University in 1989, an then went to Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1992. This migration marks the time when the Russian mathematical school effectively ceased to exist, since it failed (for economical reasons) to retain its most able students. Afterwards he has followed a successful career in the States. He developed Suslin's `motivic cohomology' idea (as far as I know, the definitions, and therefore `motivic cohomology' itself, are by Suslin; BTW, was Suslin Voevodski's adviser?) until it became a standard tool. Then he used it to prove Milnor's Conjecture. He has been brilliant up to now, and we hope that he will be even more brilliant in the future. He won a permanent positions at the IAS last February, which I hope will not affect his cleverness. In any case, at that point it is hard to imagine that a FM will help him with his career.

Laurent Lafforgue, ancien élève de l'École Normale Supérieure, had held several positions in France before becoming permanent professor at the IHES. According to the AMS, he has "formidable technical power, deep insight, and a tenacious, systematic approach". For those not used to read CVs, here is the translation: he is a very skilful craftsman. (In case you wonder, the `deep insight', as well as the `new geometric construction that may prove to be important' that appears in the same AMS press release, both refer to a compactification Lafforgue had to build in order to obtain his results.) His achievement has been to prove a part of a Langlands conjecture in a case that was by then considered feasible, but extremely involved. He succeeded after spending more than six years in producing a long proof of it (the inventiones article alone is 241 pages long). This procedure gives a good idea of what the words `skilled craftsmanship' mean in mathematics, and is the equivalent in maths of the laboratory work. It has to be remarked that, against the external view of the research world as populated by geniuses, craftsmen amount to over 95% of all researchers. Up to now there had not been many FM awarded to craftsmen, but about half of the Nobel prices go to that kind of researchers. I am mildly surprised that this candidate is the one that the French mathematical school has decided to push, but they will have their reasons. In my view, though, he is good enough a candidate to complete a four pack, but not good enough for such an stand alone show. Again, as with Voevodski, the FM will not affect or help to improve his career, except in the case that he intends to held political positions inside the IMU (as French representative) or in the French administration.

Madhu Sudan is in some sense the opposite of Lafforgue. He has worked on several subjects, and has obtained results in all of them. I am not an expert in that part of mathematics that they have fancied to call `mathematical aspects of computer science', but by the descriptions of the results I can risk to say that his results are clever (and surprising!). Moreover, he claims (and I believe him) that he has been able to explain his work to his three years old kid, which proves that the has a global vision. Let us hope that this price helps him to get a full professorship, if he wants it.

As a conclusion, what I see from these prices is that they may be useful in new or growing sciences. But as for consolidated sciences such as mathematics they are, in the best cases such as the present one, at most harmless.

Last modified: Tue Oct 15 23:00:30 CEST 2002