ICTP was pleased to learn that two of its conference lecturers have received the 2010 Fields Medal.

The Fields Medallists were announced during the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), held from the 19 to 27 August.

Ngô Bao Châu, born in Vietnam, was cited “For his proof of the Fundamental Lemma in the theory of automorphic forms through the introduction of new algebro-geometric methods.” According to the ICM website, Ngô removed one of the great impediments to a grand, decades-long program to uncover hidden connections between seemingly disparate areas of mathematics. In doing so, he provided a solid foundation for a large body of theory and developed techniques that are likely to unleash a flood of new results.

Ngô was a director and lecturer of ICTP's Summer School and Conference on Automorphic Forms and Shimura Varieties in 2007. In 2005 he gave an ICTP/SISSA Joint Colloquium in Mathematics, titled "Hitchin fibration and endoscopy".

The Fields Medal citation for Stanislav Smirnov, a Russian mathematician, read “For the proof of conformal invariance of percolation and the planar Ising model in statistical physics”. The ICM website described Smirnov's work as putting a firm mathematical foundation under a burgeoning area of mathematical physics. It said he gave elegant proofs of two long-standing, fundamental conjectures in statistical physics, finding surprising symmetries in mathematical models of physical phenomena.

Smirnov was a lecturer at ICTP's School on Stochastic Geometry, the Stochastic Loewner Evolution, and Non-Equilibrium Growth Processes in 2008.

For more details on the 2010 Fields Medallists, visit the ICM website.