Fields Medals 1950

Laurent SCHWARTZ

born March 5, 1915, Paris
University of Nancy

Developed the theory of distributions, a new notion of generalized function motivated by the Dirac delta-function of theoretical physics.

Atle SELBERG

born June 14, 1917, Langesund, Norway
Institute for Advanced Study

Developed generalizations of the sieve methods of Viggo Brun; achieved major results on zeros of the Riemann zeta function; gave an elementary proof of the prime number theorem (with P. Erdös), with a generalization to prime numbers in an arbitrary arithmetic progression.

This document has been reproduced from

Albers, Donald J.; Alexanderson, G. L.; Reid, Constance:
International mathematical congresses. An illustrated history 1893 - 1986
Rev. ed. including ICM 1986. Springer-Verlag, New York, 1986

with friendly permission from Springer Verlag