Ian Agol's Research Blog

4/4/03
Jean-Pierre Serre won the first Abel prize.
He has made some important contributions to topology, including
spectral sequences and group actions on trees, which has been
extremely influential in the study of 3-manifolds. This prize might
end up being on par with the Nobel prize, since the Fields medal
requires that the mathematician be under 40. It looks to me like
they'll be spending many years giving medals to a backlog of
superstar mathematicians like Gromov and Wiles.

Grisha Perelman will be giving some talks on Ricci flow at MIT,
April 7-11, and at Stoneybrook, April 21-May 2. I'm going to try to
make it to Stoneybrook for a few days. Might be another Abel prize
in the making, or yet another failed attempt to prove the Poincare
conjecture.