Fields Medals (listed in alphabetical order of last names)
Artur Avila
is awarded a Fields Medal for his profound contributions to dynamical systems theory, which have changed the face of the field, using the powerful idea of renormalization as a unifying principle.
Description in a few paragraphs:
Avila leads and shapes the field of dynamical systems. With his collaborators, he has made essential progress in many areas, including real and complex one-dimensional dynamics, spectral theory of the one-frequency Schro¨dinger operator, flat billiards and partially hyperbolic dynamics.
Avila’s work on real one-dimensional dynamics brought completion to the subject, with full understanding of the probabilistic point of view, accompanied by a complete renormalization theory. His work in complex dynamics led to a thorough understanding of the fractal geometry of Feigenbaum Julia sets.
In the spectral theory of one-frequency difference Schro¨dinger operators, Avila came up with a global de- scription of the phase transitions between discrete and absolutely continuous spectra, establishing surprising stratified analyticity of the Lyapunov exponent.
In the theory of flat billiards, Avila proved several long-standing conjectures on the ergodic behavior of interval-exchange maps. He made deep advances in our understanding of the stable ergodicity of typical partially hyperbolic systems.
Avila’s collaborative approach is an inspiration for a new generation of mathematicians
Manjul Bhargava
is awarded a Fields Medal for developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves.
Description in a few paragraphs:
Bhargava’s thesis provided a reformulation of Gauss’s law for the composition of two binary quadratic forms. He showed that the orbits of the group SL(2, Z)3 on the tensor product of three copies of the standard integral representation correspond to quadratic rings (rings of rank 2 over Z) together with three ideal classes whose product is trivial. This recovers Gauss’s composition law in an original and computationally effective manner. He then studied orbits in more complicated integral representations, which correspond to cubic, quartic, and quintic rings, and counted the number of such rings with bounded discriminant.
Bhargava next turned to the study of representations with a polynomial ring of invariants. The simplest such representation is given by the action of PGL(2, Z) on the space of binary quartic forms. This has two independent invariants, which are related to the moduli of elliptic curves. Together with his student Arul Shankar, Bhargava used delicate estimates on the number of integral orbits of bounded height to bound the average rank of elliptic curves. Generalizing these methods to curves of higher genus, he recently showed that most hyperelliptic curves of genus at least two have no rational points.
Bhargava’s work is based both on a deep understanding of the representations of arithmetic groups and a unique blend of algebraic and analytic expertise.
Martin Hairer
is awarded a Fields Medal for his outstanding contributions to the theory of stochastic partial differential equations, and in particular for the creation of a theory of regularity structures for such equations.
Description in a few paragraphs:
A mathematical problem that is important throughout science is to understand the influence of noise on differential equations, and on the long time behavior of the solutions. This problem was solved for ordinary differential equations by Itˆo in the 1940s. For partial differential equations, a comprehensive theory has proved to be more elusive, and only particular cases (linear equations, tame nonlinearities, etc.) had been treated satisfactorily.
Hairer’s work addresses two central aspects of the theory. Together with Mattingly he employed the Malliavin calculus along with new methods to establish the ergodicity of the two-dimensional stochastic Navier-Stokes equation.
Building on the rough-path approach of Lyons for stochastic ordinary differential equations, Hairer then created an abstract theory of regularity structures for stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). This allows Taylor-like expansions around any point in space and time. The new theory allowed him to construct systematically solutions to singular non-linear SPDEs as fixed points of a renormalization procedure.
Hairer was thus able to give, for the first time, a rigorous intrinsic meaning to many SPDEs arising in physics.
Maryam Mirzakhani
is awarded the Fields Medal for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.
Description in a few paragraphs:
Maryam Mirzakhani has made stunning advances in the theory of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces, and led the way to new frontiers in this area. Her insights have integrated methods from diverse fields, such as algebraic geometry, topology and probability theory.
In hyperbolic geometry, Mirzakhani established asymptotic formulas and statistics for the number of simple closed geodesics on a Riemann surface of genus g. She next used these results to give a new and completely unexpected proof of Witten’s conjecture, a formula for characteristic classes for the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces with marked points.
In dynamics, she found a remarkable new construction that bridges the holomorphic and symplectic aspects of moduli space, and used it to show that Thurston’s earthquake flow is ergodic and mixing.
Most recently, in the complex realm, Mirzakhani and her coworkers produced the long sought-after proof of the conjecture that – while the closure of a real geodesic in moduli space can be a fractal cobweb, defying classification – the closure of a complex geodesic is always an algebraic subvariety.
Her work has revealed that the rigidity theory of homogeneous spaces (developed by Margulis, Ratner and others) has a definite resonance in the highly inhomogeneous, but equally fundamental realm of moduli spaces, where many developments are still unfolding.
defined for parameters 
and 
0}" title="{\lambda>0}" class="latex"> by a discrete one-dimensional Schrödinger operator with cosine potential:
that is a compact subset of the real line; it arises in a number of physical contexts, most notably in the theory of the integer quantum Hall effect, though I will not discuss these applications here. Remarkably, the structure of this spectrum depends crucially on the Diophantine properties of the frequency 
. For instance, if 
is a rational number, then the operator is periodic with period 
, and then basic (discrete) Floquet theory tells us that the spectrum is simply the union of 
), the situation is much more fractal in nature, for instance in the critical case 
the spectrum (as a function of 
0}" title="{\lambda > 0}" class="latex">, the spectrum is homeomorphic to a Cantor set. Prior to the work of Avila and Jitormiskaya, there were a number of partial results on this problem, notably the result of Puig establishing Cantor spectrum for a full measure set of parameters 
, as well as results requiring a perturbative hypothesis, such as 
being very small or very large. The result was also already known for 
-component of the Tate-Shafarevich group is distributed like the cokernel of a certain random 
or rank 
, leading most recently (in combination with existing work of Gross-Zagier andof Kolyvagin, among others) to his amazing result with Skinner and Zhang that at least 
of all elliptic curves over 
(ordered by height) obey the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Previously it was not even known that a positive proportion of curves obeyed the conjecture. This is still a fair ways from resolving the conjecture fully (in particular, the situation with the presumably small number of curves of rank 
and higher is still very poorly understood, and the theory of Gross-Zagier and Kolyvagin that this work relies on is not available for other number fields than 
, where 
is a Gaussian field that forces a fixed set of frequencies. It is expected that for any reasonable choice of initial data, the solution to this equation should asymptotically be distributed according to Kolmogorov’s power law, as discussed in this previous post. This is still far from established rigorously (although there are some results in this direction for dyadic models, see e.g. this paper of Cheskidov, Shvydkoy, and Friedlander). However, Hairer and Mattingly were able to show that there was a unique probability distribution to almost every initial data would converge to asymptotically; by the ergodic theorem, this is equivalent to demonstrating the existence and uniqueness of an invariant measure for the flow. Existence can be established using standard methods, but uniqueness is much more difficult. One of the standard routes to uniqueness is to establish a “strong Feller property” that enforces some continuity on the transition operators; among other things, this would mean that two ergodic probability measures with intersecting supports would in fact have a non-trivial common component, contradicting the ergodic theorem (which forces different ergodic measures to be mutually singular). Since all ergodic measures for Navier-Stokes can be seen to contain the origin in their support, this would give uniqueness. Unfortunately, the strong Feller property is unlikely to hold in the infinite-dimensional phase space for Navier-Stokes; but Hairer and Mattingly develop a clean abstract substitute for this property, which they call the asymptotic strong Feller property, which is again a regularity property on the transition operator; this in turn is then demonstrated by a careful application of Malliavin calculus.
in a hyperbolic surface (or more precisely, she obtained asymptotics for the number of such geodesics in a given orbit of the mapping class group); the answer turns out to be polynomial in 
on such moduli spaces that are close analogues of Ratner’s celebrated rigidity theorems for unipotently generated groups (discussed in this previous blog post). Ratner’s theorems are already notoriously difficult to prove, and rely very much on the polynomial stability properties of unipotent flows; in this even more complicated setting, the unipotent flows are no longer tractable, and Mirzakhani instead uses a recent “exponential drift” method of Benoist and Quint with as a substitute. Ratner’s theorems are incredibly useful for all sorts of problems connected to homogeneous dynamics, and the analogous theorems established by Mirzakhani, Eskin, and Mohammadi have a similarly broad range of applications, for instance in counting periodic billiard trajectories in rational polygons.