Tag Archives: fields medal

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Review of Birth of a Theorem

28 May 2015

Cédric Villani’s Birth of a Theorem tells the story of a mathematical theorem, from its initial conception as a vague, throwaway observation, to its development and formal statement, right through to its proof and eventual publication, a journey lasting several years. The theorem in question is the important result of Villani and his former PhD student Clément Mouhot on the phenomena of ‘Landau damping’, a result that ultimately won Villani the 2010 Fields Medal and widespread acclaim.
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A Fields Medal at UCL: Klaus Roth

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24 March 2015

Be proud if you are studying Mathematics at UCL! Looking back, we have numerous famous alumni who later gained significant achievements in their field.  One of them is Klaus Roth, who was once a research student at UCL, and later was a lecturer and professor at the university, during which time he won the Fields Medal.

If you haven’t heard of the Fields Medal, it is seen as the equivalent of the ‘Nobel Prize’ in Mathematics (although unfortunately it has a much lower monetary reward) and is awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union.  The award is given to a maximum of four mathematicians each time, all of whom must be under the age of 40 and have made a great contribution to the development of Mathematics.  Roth won the Medal in 1958, when he was 33 years old and still a lecturer at UCL (show more respect to your lecturers … you never know!), for having “solved in 1955 the famous Thue-Siegel problem concerning the approximation to algebraic numbers by rational numbers and proved in 1952 that a sequence with no three numbers in arithmetic progression has zero density (a conjecture of Erdös and Turàn of 1935).”

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