Only Pacemakers can Win Grand prize'--Mathematician Comments

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Only Pacemakers can Win Grand prize'--Mathematician Comments

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Fields Medal Prize,the top prize in mathematics, will only be awarded to researchers who have made pioneering contribution in mathematics, a craft-brother said Wednesday while commenting on the prize winners and their achievements.

"The prize winners are pacemakers in their courses," said Ye Yangbo, professor of mathematics at Iowa University, U.S. Ye was invited to the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM)in Beijing.

French mathematician Laurent Lafforgue and Russian mathematician Vladimir Voevodsdy won the Fields Medal Prize at the opening ceremony of ICM Tuesday night.

Ye, himself an acknowledged specialist in number theory, highly praised the prize winners' achievements by saying, "they are the exploiters in the most challenging branches of mathematics."

Lafforgue's major contribution is "proving the global Langlands correspondence for function fields, thereby providing new connections between number theory and analysis," the voting committee said in a press release.

"That means, he used mathematical analysis as a measure to research the number theory, propelling the proving of Langlands Program to a unitary standard." Ye explained.

Langlands Program, put forward by the U.S. mathematician Robert Langlands in 1970s, remains a puzzle for worldwide experts in number theory. Mathematicians predicted there would be no decisive breakthrough in this decade.

And the Russian Voevodsky had also reached top-class standard in his work in algebra. "In recent years Voevodsky's cohomology theories are most impressive in algebra," Ye said.

Fields Medal Prize, regarded as "the Nobel Prize for mathematics", has become a target of Chinese mathematicians who are eager to prove their capability in research.

"We could keep the hope, since there have been several Chinese candidates for the Fields Prize at recent ICMs," Ye said, adding "that is just like the Olympic Games, Chinese need enough time before they can win first gold medal."

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