No Nobel Prize for Mathematics??
During the past week, the Nobel Prizes for various fields were announced and many of you would have seen the list of Nobel Prize winners. During my school days, whenever I used to here about the Nobel Prizes, I heard of Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine etc. Being a math enthusiast, this automatically raised a question in my mind — Why is there no Nobel Prize in mathematics? Are achievements in the field of mathematics not as important or groundbreaking as achievements in other fields of science?
To answer this question, we need to go back in history and look at why the Nobel Prizes came into being and for what purpose they are given
The History of the Nobel Prize
The Nobel prizes are named after noted Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel. He was a scientist, inventor and entrepreneur (more famously known for inventing the dynamite). The Nobel Prize is awarded in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Economics, Literature, Peace and Physiology & Medicine.
Alfred Nobel wrote his last will in the year 1895 where he left much of his wealth towards the establishment of the prize. According to an excerpt of his will, Alfred Nobel instituted the prize to “those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”
All of my remaining realisable assets are to be disbursed as follows: the capital, converted to safe securities by my executors, is to constitute a fund, the interest on which is to be distributed annually as prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The interest is to be divided into five equal parts and distributed as follows: one part to the person who made the most important discovery or invention in the field of physics; one part to the person who made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who, in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction; and one part to the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses.
An excerpt from Alfred Nobel’s will
So, Why No Nobel Prize in Mathematics?
Though only Nobel knows why he did not institute a Nobel Prize for mathematics and carried it to his grave, there have been a lot of discussions and speculations on this online.
If we read the will, Alfred Nobel has mentioned “have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”. What many people (including me) think is that, Nobel would have considered mathematics as a field that was too theoretical without any practical applications to real life. For the most part of it, pure mathematics during the 18th/19th century was thought of as being cut off from the real world and discoveries of new formulae/theorems seldom had any applications in real life.
If you take fields like physics, chemistry, medicine etc, discoveries in these fields have some practical applications in real life and have solved lot of real life problems (especially medicine)
This might have been a reason for Nobel leaving out mathematics from the list of fields for the Nobel Prize
Fun Trivia: There is one another reason doing the rounds in the internet, which claims that Nobel’s partner cheated on him with a mathematician named Mittag-Leffler, which lead to Nobel developing a deep dislike for the man and the very field he was associated with. There are no evidences to support the claim and it still stands as just a rumour.
Awards in Mathematics
So does this mean Mathematicians are not awarded? Well no. There are 2 very prestigious awards given for outstanding achievements and findings in the field of mathematics. They are the Abel Prize and the Fields Medal, which according to me are on par with the Nobel Prize
The Abel Prize
The Abel Prize is awarded for outstanding work in the field of mathematics and was established in the year 2002. It was awarded for the first time in the year 2003 to Jean-Perre Sierre for “playing a key role in shaping the modern form of many parts of mathematics, including topology, algebraic geometry and number theory”
The Abel Prize was awarded this year (2021) to 2 mathematicians László Lovász & Avi Wigderson for their contributions to the field of theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics
It is proud to note that one Indian, Srinivasa S R Vardhan, won the Abel Prize in the year 2007 for his “fundamental contributions to probability theory and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviations”
The Fields Medal
The Fields Medal is awarded once in every 4 years to a maximum of 4 mathematicians under the age of 40 years at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU)
The Fields Medal is one of the highest honours any mathematician can wish to achieve in the field and it is rightly so called as the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics”
The first Fields Medal was awarded in the year 1936 to mathematicians Lars Valerian Ahlfors (Finnish) & Jesse Douglas (American). From 1950, it has been religiously awarded every 4 years
Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, in the year 2014 was the first woman scientist to win the Fields Medal for her contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Reimann surfaces
I first came to know about the Fields Medal in August 2014, when Indian mathematician Manjul Bhargava was awarded the same for developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves
Manjul Bhargava was born in Canada in 1974. He received his PhD in 2001 from Princeton University and became a professor at Princeton in 2003
Some Concluding Remarks
Though Nobel might have thought that pure mathematics has no application in real life, that is not the case today. Nobody knows which discovery might prove to be a game changer at a particular point in time
For example, when Number Theory was discovered, it was thought to be a field with no practical applications in real life. But today?? The same Number Theory forms the base for most security algorithms in today’s data-driven world. All the encryption and decryption algorithms used (eg: RSA algorithm) to protect your data from the eyes of hackers have their base in the field of Number Theory
References
Thanks for reading!!!
Originally published at http://infinitesimallysmallcom.wordpress.com on October 12, 2021.
