The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 144

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Victor P. Snaith
Thanks to the NDP eventually winning a provincial
election, the committee’s efforts did pay off. Since its
inception, I have enjoyed attending several of the Institute’s
research programs, both as participant and as organizer. In
fact, to be honest, I have found the Fields Institute the
most co-operative and easy institute with which to arrange a
program and its resulting conference proceedings. This applies
equally to the era when it was accommodated at the University
of Waterloo and also after the move to Toronto.
The Fields Lectures series were always very popular. I
recall enjoying listening to, among others, Gerd Faltings,
Vladimir Arnold, Michael Atiyah, and Roger Penrose during
the Waterloo era.
The last of these was particularly
memorable because, although Roger Penrose was talking
about tilings and quasicrystals, an irate member of audience,
objecting to the “Emperor’s New Mind,” raced to the slide
projector, jettisoned quasicrystals and replaced them with
a manifesto. The commotion was soon quieted down by
directorial diplomacy and the lecture resumed. End of story?
Not quite.
In the Spring of 1995, Manfred Kolster and I organized
a one-week meeting as a final dénouement to the number
theory program, which had taken place in Waterloo during
1993–94. The high point of the meeting was a public lecture,
to be held in the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall, at
which Andrew Wiles was to give a public lecture on Fermat’s
Last Theorem and its proof. Admission was by ticket (1100+
of them!) distributed inter alia to grateful high schools in the
area. The place was packed out with teachers, students, and
luminaries; e.g., in the centre of the front row was violinist
Joshua Bell, who was playing at Massey Hall that evening
and who had once attended mathematics graduate courses at
the University of Indiana in Bloomington.