JEWISH RECIPIENTS
OF THE FIELDS MEDAL IN MATHEMATICS
(25% of
recipients)
THIS
WEBPAGE IS PART OF THE JINFO.ORG
WEBSITE.
- Jesse Douglas 1 (1936)
- Laurent Schwartz (1950)
- Klaus Roth (1958)
- Paul Cohen (1966)
- Alexander Grothendieck 2
(1966)
- Charles Fefferman (1978)
- Gregori Margulis (1978)
- Michael Freedman 3
(1986)
- Vladimir Drinfeld (1990)
- Edward Witten (1990)
- Efim Zelmanov (1994)
- Grigori Perelman (2006)
NOTES
1. According to the
obituary
notice for Jesse Douglas published in the October 8, 1965 edition of The
New York Herald Tribune, he died at Mount Sinai Hospital in
Manhattan
and his funeral was held the following day at the "The Riverside" (the
largest exclusively Jewish funeral chapel in New York City).
Douglas, who was
the first recipient of a Fields Medal, was born in New York City
and educated
at the City College of New York and at Columbia University. His
entry
in the 1964-1965 edition of Marquis Who's Who in America
indicates
that his mother's maiden name was Sarah Kommel. The name "Kommel"
is most frequently found among Jews originating in the Pale of
Settlement; see A
Dictionary
of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire, by Alexander Beider
(Avotaynu,
Inc., Teaneck NJ, 1993, p. 326). Both parents were, in fact,
Jewish immigrants from Russia. The death notice
lists a brother, Dr. Harold Douglas, and a sister, Pearl Schweizer,
among his
survivors. Dr. Harold Douglas maintained medical offices at Beth
Israel
Medical
Center in lower Manhattan.
2. According
to a recent memoir in the Bulletin
of the American Mathematical Society (Vol. 38, No. 4, 2001,
pp.
389-408: http://modular.fas.harvard.edu/sga/from_grothendieck.pdf) written by the prominent
mathematician Pierre
Cartier, Grothendieck's father was a Russian
Jew surnamed Shapiro and his mother a German Jewish women named Hanka
Grothendieck. Cartier, a close acquaintance of Grothendieck,
states: "what I know of his life comes from Grothendieck himself."
Thomas
Drucker's
earlier
account in Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists, edited by
Emily
McMurray (Gale Research, Detroit, 1995, pp. 821-823)
states
that Grothendieck's father was a Russian Jew named Morris Shapiro and
that the name "Grothendieck" was not that of his mother, but rather that
of a governess who cared for him
in Germany between 1929 and 1939. "In the latter year, his mother
took him to France, where he learned for the first time that he was
Jewish by ancestry." The source of this account is the mathematician and Grothendieck
biographer Colin McLarty, who has described it as
"one version that Grothendieck has given." The most recent account, by Allyn
Jackson in Notices of the American
Mathematical
Society (Vol. 51, No. 9, 2004, pp. 1039-1040: http://www.ams.org/notices/200409/fea-grothendieck-part1.pdf),
states that
Grothendieck's father was a Russian Jew whose original name may have been Alexander Shapiro, but who later assumed the name
Alexander (Sascha)
Tanaroff,
and that his mother was Johanna (Hanka) Grothendieck, a German Lutheran
from Hamburg. This information is attributed to another Grothendieck biographer, Winfried Scharlau of the
Universität Münster. As Jackson notes: "many of the details
about Grothendieck's family background and early life are sketchy or
unknown." According
to all three accounts, however, Grothendieck's father was Jewish and
was deported and murdered at Auschwitz, and Grothendieck himself was
sheltered (along with several thousand other Jews) in the French
Protestant village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in southern France. (According to Yad
Vashem, an Alexandre Tanaroff was indeed deported from
Drancy to Auschwitz on 14 August 1942.)
3. Jewish father, non-Jewish
mother.
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