New Scaratings

Hanging around with SHAKES is giving me a bad attitude.

Some few of you may have retained the traumatic memory of Brownlee Medal winners in Australian Rules Football, a Matching Round question in which you were asked to pin athletes you'd never heard of to specific, stellar years. For those who missed the quiz, or blocked the pain, it felt something like this:

Match the 2018 Fields Medal winner to an area of special interest:

a. Akshay Venkatesh 1. Birational Geometry
b. Alessio Figalli 2. Calculus
c. Peter Scholze 3. Number Theory
d. Caucher Birkar 4. Arithmetic Geometry

Those in the know will recognize the following matches:

Venkatesh - #3
Scholze - #4
Figalli - #2
Birkar - #1

Since the Fields Medal is awarded only once every four years, the judges of this "Nobel of Mathematics" honor up to four recipients at a time. The work of these winners is unrelated.

Venkatesh, ethnically Tamil, graduated from college in Australia at the ripe old age of 15, and celebrated his 16th birthday by matriculating into a PhD program at Princeton University. Alas, the charms of New Jersey were not enough to hold him. He's back in Australia.

Scholze, who was too busy doing math to settle into the discipline required of aspiring German scholars, was made a full professor at 24, shortly after he submitted his doctoral thesis. He was the youngest full professor in Germany at the time.

Figalli, whose student work was done mostly in Pisa, became a full professor at the University of Texas, Austin, but has since decamped for Switzerland.

Birkar teaches at the University of Nottingham, and is probably only barely cognizant that he's actually in northern England.

Scholze is happily German. The other three have all emigrated at least once. It's a pity the United States wasn't able to retain such rare talent as Figalli and Venkatesh. As for Caucher Birkar, he is ethnically an Iranian Kurd, and a political refugee, so he wouldn't be welcome here anyhow.

I was made aware that this is not a factual statement in the following news release, from the Minneapolis Star Tribune of August 3rd:

"A 14 carat gold medal often described as the Nobel Prize for mathematics was stolen minutes after it was awarded to a Cambridge University professor at a ceremony in Brazil on Wednesday. Caucher Birkar, 40, a former refugee of Kurdish Iranian origin, was one of four joint recipients of the Fields Medal. Within minutes of receiving the award, Birkar noticed that his briefcase containing the gold medal, his wallet and his cellphone were missing, the newspaper O Globo reported."

My apologies.