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.
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