The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 57

CHAPTER 8
Practical Matters
Derek Corneil
“[Fields] has always strongly resisted putting boundaries around
mathematics ... In short, all Fields Institute doors are open to
everything mathematical.”
When Ontario initiated the Ontario Centres of Excellence
program in 1985–86, one of the requirements was that
proposed centres had to have strong support from industry.
Seven winners were announced but, as with the Nobel Prize,
mathematics was overlooked. It is possible at that time that
the notion of a mathematics institute would not have been
able to attract the necessary industrial support.
It is also possible that mathematicians in their separate
cubby holes of pure mathematics, applied mathematics,
statistics, and the infant field of computer science, could
not have proposed a coherent, inclusive mathematics research
institute. But shortly later they could and did.
It began with Bill Shadwick, who gained the support of
the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo,