CMI Annual Meeting

John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
2700 F Street NW, Washington, DC
July 13, 2001

Doors Open: 1:30 pm

U.S. National Anthem: 2:00 pm

Sally Sanford, Soprano

Greetings by Video

President George W. Bush

Introduction

John Ewing, Master of Ceremonies

Greetings

Arthur Jaffe, Host

This elegant meeting of mathematicians and mathematics students began with the U.S. National Anthem, sung by Sally Sanford in soprano. This was followed by opening remarks by President George W. Bush and opening remarks by John Ewing. John Ewing introduced Arthur Jaffe, who is President of the Clay Mathematics Institute and Professor at Harvard University. Professor Jaffe greeted the guests, and introduced the recipients of the Clay Research Award.

The Clay Mathematics Research Awards

The Clay Mathematics Institute presents the Clay Research Award annually as its highest recognition of general achievement in mathematical research. The Clay Research Award takes the form of the elegant bronze sculpture "Figureight Knot Complement vii/CMI" by sculptor Helaman Ferguson. The 2001 Clay Research Awards were presented on July 13, 2001 by Landon and Lavinia Clay to Stanislav Smirnov and to Edward Witten. Stanislav Smirnov received the award "for establishing the existence of the scaling limit of two-dimensional percolation, and for verifying John Cardy's conjectured relation," and Edward Witten received the award for "a lifetime of achievement, especially for pointing the way to unify apparently disparate fields of mathematics and to discover their elegant simplicity through links with the physical world." Past recipients of the Clay Research Award have been Andrew Wiles, Laurent Lafforgue, and Alain Connes.

Stanislav Smirnov
KTH (Royal Institute of Technology)

"for establishing the existence of the scaling limit of two-dimensional percolation, and for verifying John Cardy's conjectured relation."

Edward Witten
The Institute for Advanced Study

"a lifetime of achievement, especially for pointing the way to unify apparently disparate fields of mathematics and to discover their elegant simplicity through links with the physical world."

Inspirational Talks

Arthur Jaffe introduced the inspirational talks and quoted Andrew Wiles' memorable remark that "countries come and go, political systems come and go, but somehow mathematics seems to have a permanence that nothing else has." Andrew Wiles and Edward Witten gave inspirational talks to an audience which filled Concert Hall at the Kennedy Center to capacity, and included about 500 mathematical olympians from 83 countries. Andrew Wiles spoke of unsolved classical problems in mathematics and number theory, and gave an example of a simple problem in classical geometry whose solution is implied by one of the hardest unsolved problems in contemporary mathematics, the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Edward Witten spoke from the viewpoint of the interaction between mathematics and physics, and encouraged the young mathematicians present in the audience to discover the successor of the Einstein equations. Professor Witten gave a heuristic explanation of one of the most important questions in the mathematical understanding of the universe: the quest for the ultimate "string equations" which play a role for 1-dimensional extended objects (strings) similar to the role played by the Einstein equations for 0-dimensional extended objects (point particles). Both speakers gave strong encouragement to the students in the audience to continue work on these fundamentally important, unsolved problems. These two inspirational talks marked the conclusion of the third annual meeting of the Clay Mathematics Institute.