1998 Fields Medal (3)
Reason for Award
contributions to four problems of geometry
Laureates
Maxim Kontsevich,
Russian Federation
Other works in the same year
- for his work on the introduction of vertex algebras, the proof of the Moonshine conjecture and for his discovery of a new class of automorphic infinite products
- William Timothy Gowers has provided important contributions tofunctional analysis, making extensive use of methods fromcombination theory. These two fields apparently have little to do with each other, and a significant achievement of Gowers has been to combine these fruitfully.
- He has made important contributions to various branches of the theory ofdynamical systems, such as the algorithmic study of polynomial equations, the study of the distribution of the points of a lattice of aLie group,hyperbolic geometry,holomorphic dynamicsand the renormalization of maps of the interval.