About Abels and similar international awards for ranked lists of awardees as science indicators of national merit in mathematics

摘要

In a recent study we have dealt with the problems of the Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine as indicators of national merit in the international science race. As well known and being the object of many legends, Alfred Nobel did not include mathematics into the list of fields the prizes he founded were awarded. That's why mathematics could not been part of our abovementioned study re Nobel prize awardees. It was announced recently that the Norwegian Academy (Oslo) has founded and will be funding from 2003 a new Nobel prize for mathematics. The Academy has given it the name of Abel prize after Niels Henrik Abel the famous Norwegian mathematician deceased at a regrettably young age. Although international science has already tried to fill the gap of not having a mathematics Nobel by founding the Fields and Wolf prizes being considered as somewhat mathematical proxies of the "true" Nobels, the Norwegian initiative has been loudly applauded by the international and particularly the mathematical science community. The birth of the Abel Award was the incentive of the present study in which we were interested to know whether the pre-Abel period can be used for tracing a quasi groundline of the Fields and Wolf prizes in mathematics up to 2003 as some of their national distributions are concerned. We have dedicated our study to the similar national distribution of the Wolf and Fields awardees together with some other international prizes in mathematics. Finally we have made an attempt to compare the national rankings of top contenders in the Nobels in physics, chemistry, and medicine with those of the Fields', Wolf's and all prizes in mathematics.