The Chern Medal

Plus has opened its temporary head office in Hyderabad! We're here for the International Conference of Women Mathematicians, starting today, and the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) starting on Thursday. The highlight (apart from Plus' presentation on public engagement with maths) will be the award of the Fields Medals for 2010.

The Fields Medal is the most prestigious prize in mathematics, akin to the Nobel Prize. It is awarded to up to four mathematicians at each ICM, which meets every four years. The prize is awarded to mathematicians under the age of 40 in recognition of their existing work and for the promise of their future achievements. You can read more about the Fields Medal on Plus.

And the Fields medal isn't the only prestigious prize being awarded at the ICM. The Rolf Nevanlinna Prize recognises achievements in mathematical aspects of computer and information science. The Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize, which was first awarded at the last congress in 2006, is for outstanding mathematical contributions that have found significant applications outside of mathematics. The first recipient of this prize was the Japanese mathematician Kiyoshi Itô, then aged 90, for his development of stochastic analysis. His work has allowed mathematicians to describe Brownian motion — a random motion similar to the one you see when you let a particle float in a liquid or gas. Itô's theory applies also to the size of a population of living organisms, to the frequency of a certain allele within the gene pool of a population, or even more complex biological quantities. It is also now integral to financial trading as it forms the basis of the Black-Scholes formula underlying almost all financial transactions that involve options or futures. (You can read more about the Black-Scholes formula in A risky business: how to price derivatives on Plus.)

This years ICM also sees the inauguration of a new prize, the Chern Medal, for an individual whose accomplishments warrant the highest level of recognition for outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics, regardless of their field or occupation. The medal is in memory of the outstanding Chinese mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern. Plus is looking forward to finding out the winners of all of the prizes at this year's ICM, and more importantly, to learning about their mathematical achievements and how they have contributed to mathematics and society at large. Stay tuned to our news section, our blog or follow us on Twitter to find out all the news first.