It was called the “Ten-Martini Problem”, a notorious mathematical conundrum considered so hard that its originator promised 10 cocktails to whoever solved it. Artur Avila was the little-known Brazilian wunderkind who conjured up the required algebra nine years ago, leaving Ivy League professors shaken and stirred, and announcing his arrival as one of the world’s most gifted mathematicians.
Now just 35, Mr Avila is one of four academics named on Tuesday as recipients of the Fields Medal, the highest honour in the rarefied world of mathematics. The announcement was a pleasing series of firsts: Mr Avila became the first Latin American winner (he now works in both France and Brazil, and has dual citizenship), and 37-year-old Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian professor at Stanford University, the first woman. The other winners are Martin Hairer, 38, an Austrian based at Warwick university, a colleague of whom once joked that his work was so incredible that it must have been downloaded into his brain by aliens; and Manjul Bhargava, a tabla-playing 40-year-old Canadian-American number theorist at Princeton, cited as having the Midas touch.
The attached purse is insignificant when compared to the Nobels, at just C$15,000 ($13,700), but the kudos is just as substantial. The gold medals are awarded by a secret committee of the International Mathematical Union, only once every four years, to between two and four scholars who must be aged 40 or under in the year in which the awards are dished out. Other brilliant names have been felled by this brutal age requirement, notably Andrew Wiles, the British mathematician who finally solved Fermat’s last theorem in 1995 aged 42. The mean age of Nobel laureates is 59.