Hamilton Mathematics Institute welcomes two Fields Medal winners

Posted on: 13 February 2017

Trinity College Dublin’s Hamilton Mathematics Institute (HMI) recently welcomed a number of world-leading mathematicians to an international conference. Among them were two Fields Medal winners, Maxim Kontsevich (IHES) and Andrei Okounkov (Columbia University).

The Fields Medal – dubbed the mathematician's “Nobel Prize” — is one of the highest honours that a mathematician can receive. It is awarded to mathematicians under 40 at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU).

Maxim Kontsevich is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and a distinguished professor at the University of Miami. In 1998, he won the Fields Medal for his contributions to four problems of Geometry. Andrei Okounkov is a professor at Columbia University. He received the Fields Medal in 2006 for his contributions to bridging probability, representation theory and algebraic geometry.

Other distinguished speakers at the HMI conference included Gregory Gabadadze (New York University), Nikita Nekrasov (Simons Centre for Geometry and Physics, Stony Brook) and Yuri Tschinkel (NYU and Simons Foundation). 

HMI Director and Professor of Natural Philosophy (1847), Samson Shatashvili, said: “The HMI conference is part of our renewed programme of activities aimed at facilitating the exchange of ideas and expertise through visits and lectures by leading international mathematicians and theoretical physicists to Ireland.”

“The HMI conference offered our students — and the wider mathematics community in Ireland — the opportunity to learn from and interact with academic leaders in their fields.” 

The Hamilton Mathematics Institute (HMI) at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) was created in 2003 and was officially launched in 2005, to mark the bicentenary of Sir William Rowan Hamilton’s birth in that year.

Hamilton was one of the world’s great mathematicians who spent his life in Dublin and his academic life in Trinity, becoming the Andrews Professor of Astronomy (1783) and the Royal Astronomer of Ireland in the College before he had even completed his undergraduate degree.