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Elaine McKinnon Riehm
him entrée into the Royal Society of London and gave him standing in scientific circles in Canada, including membership in the Royal Society of Canada.
The 1898 manuscript for his book, handwritten in dipped pen and ink, may be found today in the stacks of the Gerstein Science Information Centre at the University of Toronto— hard evidence of the man’ s presence. It is vulnerable there to damp and book thieves, and should probably be moved either to the Mathematics Library or to the University of Toronto Archives for safe keeping. But Fields was careless with his own correspondence and memorabilia and would not likely care.
There is a further slender artifact linking John Charles Fields with the Fields Institute. In 1929, Fields began exploring his idea of a medal: an international prize acknowledging outstanding research in mathematics. Fields died in August 1932, shortly before sculptor R. Tait McKenzie had designed the medal. But Fields had made his wishes known and had given a lot of thought to its design. In his determination to make the medal truly international, he specified that there should be no modern language used, no country or person from the modern era named. He left these instructions with J. L Synge, his mathematical colleague, executor, and friend. Early in 1933, a small box arrived at the University of Toronto addressed to Professor Synge. It contained the first prototype casting in bronze of what has become known, contrary to Fields’ wishes, as the Fields Medal. The foundry sent it to Synge for his approval. It sits now, courtesy of Cathleen Morawetz, Synge’ s daughter and herself an esteemed mathematician, in the safe at the Fields Institute.
Notwithstanding the time warp between 1932 and 1992, John Charles Fields and the Fields Institute are a perfect fit philosophically. They share a fierce commitment to scientific research. When Fields was organizing the 1924 Toronto Congress in the absence of scientists from Germany and its