Despite the renown of the Fields Medals,
J.C. Fields has been until now a rather obscure figure, and
recovering details about his professional activities and personal life
was not at all a simple task. This work is a triumph of persistence
with far-flung archival and documentary sources, and provides a rich
non-mathematical portrait of the man in all aspects of his life and
career. Highly readable and replete with period detail, the book sheds
useful light on the mathematical and scientific world of Fields' time,
and is sure to remain the definitive biographical study.
—Tom Archibald, Simon Fraser University,
Burnaby, BC, Canada
Drawing on a wide array of archival sources,
Riehm and Hoffman provide a vivid account of Fields' life and his part
in the founding of the highest award in mathematics. Filled with
intriguing detail—from a childhood on the shores of Lake Ontario,
through the mathematics seminars of late 19th century Berlin, to the
post-WW1 years of the fragmented international mathematical
community—it is a richly textured story engagingly and sympathetically
told. Read this book and you will understand why Fields never wanted
the medal to bear his name and yet why, quite rightly, it
does.
—June Barrow-Green, Open University, Milton
Keynes, United Kingdom
One of the little-known effects of World War I was the collapse of
international scientific cooperation. In mathematics, the discord
continued after the war's end and after the Treaty of Versailles had
been signed in 1919. Many distinguished scientists were involved in the
war and its aftermath, and from their letters and papers, now almost a
hundred years old, we learn of their anguished wartime views and their
struggles afterwards either to prolong the schism in mathematics or to
end it.
J.C. Fields, the foremost Canadian mathematician of his time, was
educated in Canada, the United States, and Germany, and championed an
international spirit of cooperation to further the frontiers of
mathematics. It was during the awkward post-war period that
J.C. Fields established the Fields Medal, an international prize for
outstanding research, which soon became the highest award in
mathematics. J.C. Fields intended it to be an international medal,
and a glance at the varying backgrounds of the fifty-two Fields
medallists shows it to be so.
Who was Fields? What carried him from Hamilton, Canada West, where he
was born in 1863, into the middle of this turbulent era of international
scientific politics? A modest mathematician, he was an unassuming man.
This biography outlines Fields' life and times and the difficult
circumstances in which he created the Fields Medal. It is the first such
published study.
Readership
Anyone interested in the history of mathematics and specifically
Fields, and the Fields medal.