ICM2010 — opening ceremony in brief

The laudationes start in half an hour, so all I have time for is a few headlines (though you will almost certainly have these from other sources).

The Fields medals went to Elon Lindenstrauss, Ngô Bảo Châu, Stanislav Smirnov and Cedric Villani. The Nevanlinna prize was awarded to Dan Spielman. The Gauss prize went to Yves Meyer and the Chern medal was given to Louis Nirenberg. The Laudationes for the Fields medals and Nevanlinna prize will be given by Hillel Furstenberg, Jim Arthur, Harry Kesten, Horng-Tzer Yau and Gil Kalai, respectively, and I’m looking forward to them. I’ll admit now that I was on the Fields medal committee — a difficult job, and moreover one that means that there are things that I cannot discuss on this blog (not that in any case I would like to engage publicly in discussions about whether the right decisions were made). What I can say is that the four people who have won Fields medals have spectacular achievements to their names.

Other interesting news was that the next ICM will be in South Korea (in Seoul), that the next IMU president will be Ingrid Daubechies, the first woman to hold the post, and that if you type “ICM” into the IMU web page you can now find every single article that has ever appeared in an ICM proceedings, and that this database is searchable.

I’ll describe the opening ceremony in more detail in my next post. I’ll include a description of what the prizewinners were wearing. (If you look up Cedric Villani in Google images, you’ll see that this is a more interesting question than you might at first think.)

That’s it for the time being.