The equivalent to the non-existent Nobel Prize for Mathematics, Fields Medals are awarded every four years for outstanding achievements in mathematics. If you've heard of the medal, you're either into math, or you heard Robin Williams shouting "There's more to life than a fucking Fields Medal!" in Good Will Hunting.

The medal itself is a gold plated cast about 11 inches in diameter, and all recipients must be 40 years of age or younger. First given out in Oslo in 1936, the Fields Medal has been awarded forty-two times in its history. The award was established in the will of J.C. Fields, a mathematician and president of the 1924 International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto.

Fields Medal Award Winners

1936    Lars Valerian Ahlfors (Harvard University)
        Jesse Douglas (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

** Fields Medals were not awarded during World War II. **

1950    Laurent Schwartz (University of Nancy)
        Alte Selberg (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)

1954    Kunihiko Kodaira (Princeton University)
        Jean-Pierre Serre (University of Paris)

1958    Klaus Friedrich Roth (University of London)
        René Thom (University of Strasbourg)

1962    Lars V. Hörmander (University of Stockholm)
        John Willard Milnor (Princeton University)

1966    Michael Francis Atiyah (Oxford University)
        Paul Joseph Cohen (Stanford University)
        Alexander Grothendieck (University of Paris)
        Stephen Smale (University of California, Berkeley)

1970    Alan Baker (Cambridge University)
        Heisuke Hironaka (Harvard University)
        Serge P. Novikov (Moscow University)
        John Griggs Thompson (Cambridge University)

1974    Enrico Bombieri (University of Pisa)
        David Bryant Mumford (Harvard University)

1978    Pierre René Deligne (Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques)
        Charles Louis Fefferman (Princeton University)
        Gregori Alexandrovitch Margulis (Moscow University)
        Daniel G. Quillen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

1982    Alain Connes (Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques)
        William P. Thurston (Princeton University)
        Shing-Tung Yau (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)

1986    Simon Donaldson (Oxford University)
        Gerd Faltings (Princeton University)
        Michael Freedman (University of California, San Diego)

1990    Vladimir Drinfeld (Physics Institute Of Kharkov)
        Vaughan Jones (University of California, Berkeley)
        Shigefumi Mori (University of Kyoto)
        Edward Witten (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)

1994    Pierre-Louis Lions (Université de Paris-Dauphine)
        Jean-Christophe Yoccoz (Université de Paris-Sud)
        Jean Bourgain (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
        Efim Zelmanov (University of Wisconsin)

1998    Richard E. Borcherds (Cambridge University)
        W. Timothy Gowers (Cambridge University)
        Maxim Kontsevich (IHES Bures-sur-Yvette)
        Curtis T. McMullen (Harvard University)

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