John Charles Fields
| John Charles Fields | |
|---|---|
John Charles Fields
|
|
| Born |
May 14, 1863 Hamilton, Ontario |
| Died | August 9, 1932 (aged 69) Toronto, Ontario |
| Resting place | Hamilton Cemetery |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Doctoral students | Samuel Beatty |
| Known for | Fields Medal, Fields Institute |
John Charles Fields, FRS,FRSC (May 14, 1863 – August 9, 1932) was a Canadian mathematician and the founder of the Fields Medal for outstanding achievement in mathematics. First awarded in 1936, the medal has been awarded since 1950 every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians to two or four recipients under the age of 40.
Born in Hamilton, Ontario to a leather shop owner, Fields graduated from Hamilton Collegiate Institute in 1880 and the University of Toronto in 1884 before leaving for the United States to study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Fields received his Ph.D. in 1887. His thesis, entitled Symbolic Finite Solutions and Solutions by Definite Integrals of the Equation dny/dxn = xmy, was published in the American Journal of Mathematics in 1886.
Fields taught for two years at Johns Hopkins before joining the faculty of Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Disillusioned with the state of mathematical research in North America at the time, he left for Europe in 1891, locating primarily in Berlin, Göttingen and Paris, where he associated with some of the greatest mathematical minds of the time, including Karl Weierstrass, Felix Klein, Ferdinand Georg Frobenius and Max Planck. Fields also began a friendship with Gösta Mittag-Leffler, which would endure their lifetimes. He began publishing papers on a new topic, algebraic functions, which would prove to be the most fruitful research field of his career.
...
Wikipedia