The Myth and the Medal

The weekend before the start of the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians, I contributed an op-ed to the New York Times about the history of the Fields Medal. The article treated two topics that are familiar to many mathematicians, if not necessarily to the general public. I suggested that a previously unrecognized connection between these two stories, discovered in the course of my research, helped illuminate the relationship between politics and modern mathematics. The first relatively well-known story involved the lack of a Nobel Prize in mathematics and the creation of the Fields Medal some three decades later. While the criteria, compensation, and other aspects of these awards have always been quite different, many have seen the Fields Medal’s origin as a response to the lack of a corresponding Nobel Prize (e.g. [18, p. 167] [9, p. 62]). Especially for public audiences, the Fields Medal is often called the Nobel Prize of Mathematics. Even the organizers of the 2014 ICM used the comparison on their official website. The second story was the public controversy surrounding Stephen Smale’s 1966 Fields Medal and his opposition to the Vietnam War. I became interested in Smale’s tale while studying the published and private documents that circulated in the international mathematical community after World War II. Before 1966, with one exception, no source I encountered made what today is an almost reflexive comparison between the Fields Medal and the more famous Nobel Prize. After 1966, the comparison quickly became common. Looking closer, I found that the seemingly perennial speculation about the lack of a Nobel Prize in mathematics and its relation to the origins of