The Fermat prize of mathematical research biennially rewards research works in fields where the contributions of Pierre de Fermat have been decisive:
The spirit of the prize is focused on rewarding the results of research accessible to the greatest number of professional mathematicians within these fields. The Fermat prize was created in 1989 and is awarded once every two years in Toulouse by the Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse. The amount of the Fermat prize has been fixed at 20,000 Euros for the twelfth edition (2011).
Year | Prize Winners | Citation |
---|---|---|
1989 | Abbas Bahri | "for the introduction of new methods in the calculus of variations" |
Kenneth Ribet | "for his contribution to number theory and Fermat's Last Theorem" | |
1991 | Jean-Louis Colliot-Thélène | "for his work on number theory and rational manifolds the research for which was undertaken to a large extent with Jean-Jacques Sansuc" |
1993 | Jean-Michel Coron | "for his contributions to the study of variational problems and control theory" |
1995 | Andrew Wiles | "for his works on the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture which resulted in the demonstration of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem" |
1997 | Michel Talagrand | "for his fundamental contributions in various domains of probability" |
1999 | Fabrice Béthuel | "for several important contributions to the theory of variational calculus, which have consequences in Physics and Geometry" |
Frédéric Hélein | ||
2001 | Richard Taylor | "for his various contributions to the study of links between Galois representations and automorphic forms" |
Wendelin Werner | "for his works on the intersection exponents of Brownian motion and their impact in theoretical Physics" | |
2003 | Luigi Ambrosio | "for his impressive contributions to the calculus of variations and geometric measure theory, and their link with partial differential equations" |
2005 | Pierre Colmez | "for his contributions to the study of L-functions and p-adic Galois representations" |
Jean-François Le Gall | "for his contributions to the fine analysis of planar Brownian motions, his invention of the Brownian snake and its applications to the study of non-linear partial differential equations" | |
2007 | Chandrashekhar Khare | "for his proof (with Jean-Pierre Wintenberger) of the Serre modularity conjecture in number theory" |
2009 | Elon Lindenstrauss | "for his contributions to ergodic theory and their applications in number theory" |
Cédric Villani | "for his contributions to the theory of optimal transport and his studies of non-linear evolution equations" | |
2011 | Manjul Bhargava | "for his work on various generalizations of the Davenport-Heilbronn estimates and for his recent startling results (with Arul Shankar) on the average rank of elliptic curves" |
Igor Rodnianski | "for his fundamental contributions to the studies of the equations of general relativity and to the propagation of the light on the space-time curves (in collaboration with Mihalis Dafermos, Sergiu Klainerman, and Hans Lindblad)" | |
2013 | Camillo De Lellis | "for his fundamental contributions (in collaboration with László Székelyhidi) to the conjecture of Onsager about dissipative solutions of the Euler-equations and for his work to the regularity of minimal surfaces" |
Martin Hairer | "for his contributions to the analysis of stochastic partial differential equations, especially for the regularity of their solutions and convergence to the equilibrium" | |
2015 | Laure Saint-Raymond | "for the development of asymptotic theories of partial differential equations, including the fluid limits of rarefied flows, multiscale analysis in plasma physics equations and ocean modeling, and the derivation of the Boltzmann equation from interacting particle systems" [1] |
Peter Scholze | "for his invention of perfectoid spaces and their application to fundamental problems in algebraic geometry and in the theory of automorphic forms" [1] | |
2017 | Simon Brendle | "for his numerous and profound results in geometric analysis, involving partial differential equations of elliptic, parabolic and hyperbolic type; in particular for his elegant proof of Lawson's conjecture, for his characterization of soliton solutions of Ricci flows and mean curvature in dimension 3 as well as for his remarkable contributions, in collaboration with Gerhard Huisken, to the analysis of mean curvature flow of mean convex surfaces in manifolds of dimension 3" [2] |
Nader Masmoudi | "for his remarkable work of depth and creativity in the analysis of nonlinear partial differential equations and in particular for his recent contributions to the rigorous and complete resolution of hydrodynamic stability problems raised at the end of the 19th century by the founding fathers of modern fluid mechanics" [2] | |
2019 | Alexei Borodin | "for the invention of integrable probability theory, a new area at the interface of representation theory, combinatorics and statistical physics" [3] |
Maryna Viazovska | "for her original solution of the famous sphere packing problem in dimensions 8 and 24" [3] | |
2021 | Fernando Codá Marques | "for major advances obtained with André Neves on geometric applications of the calculus of variations" [4] |
Vincent Pilloni | "for his remarkable results in arithmetic geometry on p-adic modular forms, in particular through the introduction and development of higher Hida theory" [4] | |
2023 | Jason P. Miller | "for his major advances in random geometry, including relation to Liouville quantum gravity (partly with Scott Sheffield)." [5] |
Aaron C. Naber | "for his groundbreaking work on Ricci limit spaces, in particular rectifiability, isometry group and co-dimension 4 conjecture." | |
There has also been a Pierre Fermat medal, which has been awarded for example to chemist Linus Pauling (1957), [6] mathematician Ernst Peschl (1965) [7] and botanist Francis Raymond Fosberg. [8]
The Junior Fermat Prize is a mathematical prize, awarded every two years to a student in the first four years of university for a contribution to mathematics. The amount of the prize is 2000 Euros.
Alain Connes is a French mathematician, known for his contributions to the study of operator algebras and noncommutative geometry. He is a professor at the Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Ohio State University and Vanderbilt University. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982.
Sir Andrew John Wiles is an English mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in number theory. He is best known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize and the 2017 Copley Medal and for which he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. In 2018, Wiles was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Wiles is also a 1997 MacArthur Fellow.
The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place every four years. The name of the award honours the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields.
Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time. For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is one of five people to have won more than one Nobel Prize. Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two people to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields, the other being Marie Curie.
Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1954, the Wolf Prize in 2000 and the inaugural Abel Prize in 2003.
Wendelin Werner is a German-born French mathematician working on random processes such as self-avoiding random walks, Brownian motion, Schramm–Loewner evolution, and related theories in probability theory and mathematical physics. In 2006, at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, Spain he received the Fields Medal "for his contributions to the development of stochastic Loewner evolution, the geometry of two-dimensional Brownian motion, and conformal field theory". He is currently Rouse Ball professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
Pierre de Fermat was a French mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of differential calculus, then unknown, and his research into number theory. He made notable contributions to analytic geometry, probability, and optics. He is best known for his Fermat's principle for light propagation and his Fermat's Last Theorem in number theory, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica. He was also a lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse, France.
Michel Pierre Talagrand is a French mathematician. Doctor of Science since 1977, he has been, since 1985, Directeur de Recherches at CNRS and a member of the Functional Analysis Team of the Institut de Mathématique of Paris. Talagrand was also a faculty member at The Ohio State University for more than fifteen years. Talagrand was elected as correspondent of the Académie des sciences of Paris in March 1997, and then as a full member in November 2004, in the Mathematics section. In 2024, Talagrand received the Abel Prize.
Chandrashekhar B. Khare is a professor of mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles. In 2005, he made a major advance in the field of Galois representations and number theory by proving the level 1 Serre conjecture, and later a proof of the full conjecture with Jean-Pierre Wintenberger. He has been on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2015, serving as Jury Chair from 2020.
Ernst Sejersted Selmer was a Norwegian mathematician, who worked in number theory, as well as a cryptologist. The Selmer group of an Abelian variety is named after him. His primary contributions to mathematics reside within the field of diophantine equations. He started working as a cryptologist during the Second World War; due to his work, Norway became a NATO superpower in the field of encryption.
Sir Martin Hairer is an Austrian-British mathematician working in the field of stochastic analysis, in particular stochastic partial differential equations. He is Professor of Mathematics at EPFL and at Imperial College London. He previously held appointments at the University of Warwick and the Courant Institute of New York University. In 2014 he was awarded the Fields Medal, one of the highest honours a mathematician can achieve. In 2020 he won the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.
Alexei Mikhailovich Borodin is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Enrico Giusti was an Italian mathematician mainly known for his contributions to the fields of calculus of variations, regularity theory of partial differential equations, minimal surfaces and history of mathematics. He was professor of mathematics at the Università di Firenze; he also taught and conducted research at the Australian National University at Canberra, at the Stanford University and at the University of California, Berkeley. After retirement, he devoted himself to the managing of the "Giardino di Archimede", a museum entirely dedicated to mathematics and its applications. Giusti was also the editor-in-chief of the international journal dedicated to the history of mathematics Bollettino di storia delle scienze matematiche.
Igor Rodnianski is an American mathematician at Princeton University. He works in partial differential equations, mathematical physics, and general relativity.
Camillo De Lellis is an Italian mathematician who is active in the fields of calculus of variations, hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, geometric measure theory and fluid dynamics. He is a permanent faculty member in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is also one of the two managing editors of Inventiones Mathematicae.
Peter Scholze is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry. He has been a professor at the University of Bonn since 2012 and director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics since 2018. He has been called one of the leading mathematicians in the world. He won the Fields Medal in 2018, which is regarded as the highest professional honor in mathematics.
Ernst Ferdinand Peschl was a German mathematician.
Laure Saint-Raymond is a French mathematician, and a professor of mathematics at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES). She was previously a professor at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. She is known for her work in partial differential equations, and in particular for her contributions to the mathematically rigorous study of the connections between interacting particle systems, the Boltzmann equation, and fluid mechanics. In 2008 she was awarded the European Mathematical Society Prize, with her citation reading:
Saint-Raymond is well known for her outstanding results on nonlinear partial differential equations in the dynamics of gases and plasmas and also in fluid dynamics. [...] Saint-Raymond is at the origin of several outstanding and difficult results in the field of nonlinear partial differential equations of mathematical physics. She is one of the most brilliant young mathematicians in her generation.
Fernando Codá dos Santos Cavalcanti Marques is a Brazilian mathematician working mainly in geometry, topology, partial differential equations and Morse theory. He is a professor at Princeton University. In 2012, together with André Neves, he proved the Willmore conjecture. Since then, among proving other important conjectures, Marques and Neves greatly extended Almgren–Pitts min-max theory to prove theorems about minimal surfaces.
Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska is a Ukrainian mathematician known for her work in sphere packing. She is a full professor and Chair of Number Theory at the Institute of Mathematics of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. She was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022.
He was awarded the Pierre Fermat Medal in 1965 and the Medal of the University of Jyväskylä.
He had been awarded five major medals: .... the Fermat Medal of Toulouse Academy,....