The Fields Medal carries a typo in Roman numerals
Mathematics' most famous prize is a 169-gram disc of 14-carat gold showing Archimedes, and it has a mistake on its face. The year 1933 is rendered in Roman numerals as MCNXXXIII instead of MCMXXXIII. Winners must be under 40, and one of them turned the medal down.
The award is named after the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, who designed it, put up the prize money and died before it was first given; John Lighton Synge saw his plan through. Lars Ahlfors of Finland and Jesse Douglas of the United States received the first medals in 1936, and it has been presented every four years since 1950, to between two and four people at the International Congress of Mathematicians. The cash is modest, CA$15,000 since 2006, but it is widely called the Nobel Prize of mathematics.
The age cap reflects Fields' wish to encourage future work as well as honour past results. Recipients must be under 40 on 1 January of the award year, and nobody can win twice. Jean-Pierre Serre remains the youngest winner, at 27 in 1954. Andrew Wiles, already too old by the time his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was complete, received a special silver plaque in 1998 instead, which Don Zagier jokingly called a quantized Fields Medal.
Politics has repeatedly intruded. Alexander Grothendieck boycotted the 1966 congress in Moscow in protest at Soviet military actions in Eastern Europe. Soviet restrictions kept Sergei Novikov from Nice in 1970 and Grigory Margulis from Helsinki in 1978. Martial law in Poland pushed the 1982 congress in Warsaw back a year. Grigori Perelman, the solver of the Poincaré conjecture, rejected his 2006 award and stayed away from the congress, saying he did not want to be displayed like an animal in a zoo.
Edward Witten became the first physicist to win, in 1990. In 2014 Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman, followed by Maryna Viazovska in 2022 and Hong Wang in 2026. By 2026 the medal had gone to 68 people in total.
Source: Fields Medal
