UC Professor 1 of 3 to Win Fields Medal : L.A. Native Lauded With Most Prestigious Award in Mathematics
A 35-year-old professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego, was named Sunday as one of three winners of the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, for his work on four-dimensional topology.
Michael H. Freedman, a native of Los Angeles, received the prize along with Simon K. Donaldson, 28, of Oxford University, and Gerd Faltings, 32, a West German now at Princeton University, at the opening ceremonies of the International Congress of Mathematicians.
The congress is a quadrennial event being held in the United States for the first time since 1950. About 4,000 mathematicians from 70 countries have gathered on the UC Berkeley campus for nine days of lecturing, palavering and exchanging ideas.
The work for which Freedman won the medal is deeply theoretical, but it proves that Einstein’s four-dimensional space-time universe (in which we experience three dimensions) is only one of the possible space-time configurations. It does not mean that there are necessarily other universes, only that there could be.
But at a press conference after the awarding of the prizes, Freedman declined to speculate about a possible relationship between his work and astrophysics.
“The connection won’t be the naive one that we have discovered the universe that we’re living in,” he said. And he noted that string theory, the hottest idea in theoretical physics today, implies that the universe may have 10 dimensions or 26 dimensions, so four dimensions may be a bit passe in any case.
There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, but the Fields Medal, though less well known, is considered its equivalent.
Freedman is no stranger to honors. In 1984, he was named California Scientist of the Year and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The following year he received a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called “genius” award), and in 1986 he won the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry.
But neither Freedman, Donaldson nor Faltings had much success Sunday in explaining their mathematics or its relationship to the rest of the world. Their work is entirely theoretical, a product of their minds. It may or may not apply to anything outside mathematics.
Like Freedman, Donaldson’s work is also in four-dimensional topology, while Faltings received his medal for his proof of the Mordell conjecture, which holds that if there are any integer solutions to polynomial equations higher than order 3, there are only a finite number of them. This conjecture is related to Fermat’s Last Theorem, one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics.
