Congratulations to Akshay and Peter — don’t spend all those loonies at once! (Actually, I’m not sure that’s a grammatically correct usage of the word loonies unless they pay the winners in the form of 15000 coins; possibly the Hawk can correct me.)
One could (perhaps) equally offer commiserations — at this point, such a prize has little to no effect on your professional advancement, but may well seriously increase low-level harassment both from the press and from certain types of graduate student who will now follow you around in a ring at conferences at a respectful distance of two to six feet. (Perhaps they already do.)
Of course, echoing Emmanuel’s sentiments, in addition to not forgetting the collaborators of this year’s Fields medalists, let us especially not forget those people (currently estimated as a set of size one cough cough) who have collaborated with at least two of this year’s winners — you have clearly inspired [edit: adeptly ridden the coattails of] the next generation of mathematicians.
Now who could forget Jean Bourgain?
Sure, just go ahead and out me….
Very happy for both of them! So was I the only one at our dinner Craigie on Main who didn’t know (or at least have concrete reasons to strongly suspect) yet about Akshay, or did Quanta talk to you more recently than that?
I think the Quanta article would have made perfect sense just in the context of AV being hired by the IAS — not all articles have to be about fields medalists! I think I spoke to Erica in April; my main concern at the time was not saying anything stupid. I had honestly assumed that, although AV certainly deserved such an honor (modulo the fact that it’s all a bit of a silly circus which at least serves the purpose of generating excitement beyond the mathematical community), the committee wouldn’t have the guts to award two medals in the Langlands program. So Kudos to the committee for doing so.
Maybe this is extending the boudaries of the Langlands program a bit far to say that what Scholze and Venkatesh are doing is part of it….
A good point! I should have worded it better (maybe “number theory”).
I have benefited immensely from my chance to collaborate with Akshay.
Also, while “Loonie” is first and foremost the coin, it has become by extension also a term for the currency. So yes, the laureates will each have 15,000 Loonies to spend.