ICM items

A few ICM-related things spotted:

– the talks seem to be all recorded, and should appear here in due course, which is great news

– here’s a close-up of a shiny medal in Avila’s hand

– there’s been a fairly absurd war of edits on the wikipidia page for the Fields medal, related to (dual-)nationality and place of birth

– a not so pseudononymous blogger has posted not very kind comments about some medalists

– the 2018 ICM will indeed take place in Rio (it had been confirmed some time ago apparently)

2014 ICM prizes announced

Don’t know if it’s bug or feature, but ahead of the ceremony the IMU has just put up on its website the names and press releases:

Fields medal: Artur Avila, Manjul Bhargava, Martin Hairer and Maryam Mirzakhani.

Rolf Nevanlinna Prize: Subhash Khot.

Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize: Stanley Osher.

Chern Medal: Philipp Griffiths.

Leelavati Prize: Adrián Paenza.

ICM Emmy Noether Lecture: Georgia Benkart.

Probably the best thing to do for now is to celebrate the historical event of a woman being awarded the Fields Medal 🙂

Edit: Quanta Magazine has just advertised on twitter (where I first learned about the prizes) a set of 5 nice videos and articles about the winners. Probably much more to come from the worldwide press in the next few hours…

Live broadcast of the ICM opening ceremony

On the facebook page of ICM2014 it says that the live broadcast on aug 13 (aug 12 in the americas) will be on http://www.ebs.co.kr/onair?channelCodeString=tv and will last for 70 minutes.

It will start at 9:20am Korean time, so that’s:

04:50am Teheran time (aug 13)

2:20am Paris and Vienna time (aug 13)

1:20am London time (aug 13)

9:20pm Rio time (aug 12)

8:20pm NYC time (aug 12)

5:20pm LA time (aug 12)

So, not too bad for those in Asia or the Americas, more difficult for those in Europe and the Middle East…

Some pre-ceremony stats (inspired by the wikipedia page) that may or may not change:

Number of previous women winners: 0

Age of youngest winner: 27 (Serre)

At least one Russian winner (true since 1994, so 5 in a row so far)

All winners are in the 36-40 age bracket (was true in 2010)

At least one winner works in Probability broadly speaking (true in 2006 and 2010)

No winner born in the US (true since 2002)

At least one of the winners has held a permanent position in France at some point during his/her pre-medal career (true since 2002)

About 24 hours to go…