News Highlights
Author:
Rima Cortbawi,
Office of Communications,
rgc01@aub.edu.lb
 CAMS website
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Mathematician's intriguing media attention story
Ball introducing Henri Poincare in his power-point presentation |
A gripping account by internationally-recognized Professor John Ball, the lecture, hosted by the Center for Advanced Mathematical Sciences (CAMS) in College Hall on October 28, revealed some intriguing facts about the rejection of the Field Medal Award by Russian mathematics genius Grigori Perelman in 2006. The Power-Point presentation uncovered the unusual events surrounding the proof of the Poincare Conjecture by Perelman and the role the media played in the whole incident. As president at that time (2003-06) of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), Ball is the most-suitably-positioned candidate to tell this unfolding story of personalities and mathematics.
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Professor Ball started by introducing Henri Poincare (1854-1912) and describing his eponymous conjecture related to topology. As one of the most famous open problems in mathematics, proving the conjecture merited honorable recognition by the world's mathematical community, and Perelman was one of the four mathematicians to be awarded the 2006 Fields Medal by the IMU at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid. The honor is equivalent to a Nobel Prize, and the ceremony is held every four years in a different country.
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Perelman's proof in "70 pages of condensed mathematics" contained no detail, and it took two noted American mathematicians from 2003 to 2006 to fill in some gaps. In the meantime two Chinese mathematicians, having published a complete proof in a 300-page article that was announced at a conference in Beijing in 2006, were reported to have "put together the final pieces" of Perelman's "guidelines." Following such injurious implications and the subsequent world-wide media attention, including one New Yorker cartoon showing a Chinese mathematician trying to snatch a medal from Perelman's neck, it appeared that Perelman, who had already refused a 1996 European Prize for young mathematicians, would decline the Fields Medal as well. And he did.
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A Fellow of the Royal Society in Edinburgh, Ball is Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy and a fellow of the Queen's College at Oxford University. He was educated at Cambridge and Sussex Universities, becoming professor of mathematics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh before taking up his Oxford Post. He was knighted in the New Year's Honors list for 2006 for "services to science."
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