International Congress of Mathematicians - History

History

Felix Klein and Georg Cantor are credited with putting forward the idea of an international congress of mathematicians in the 1890s. The first International Congress of Mathematicians was held in Zurich in August 1897. The organizers included such prominent mathematicians as Luigi Cremona, Felix Klein, Gösta Mittag-Leffler, Andrey Markov, and others. The congress was attended by 208 mathematicians from 16 countries, including 12 from Russia and 7 from the U.S.A.

During the 1900 congress in Paris, France, David Hilbert announced his famous list of 23 unsolved mathematical problems, now termed Hilbert's problems.

At the 1904 ICM Gyula Kőnig delivered a lecture where he claimed that Cantor's famous Continuum Hypothesis was false. An error in Kőnig's proof was discovered by Ernst Zermelo soon thereafter. Kőnig's announcement at the congress caused considerable uproar, and Klein had to personally explain to Grossherzog of Baden (who was a financial sponsor of the congress) what could cause such an unrest among mathematicians.

During the 1912 congress in Cambridge, England, Edmund Landau listed four basic problems about prime numbers, now called Landau's problems. The 1924 congress in Toronto was organized by John Charles Fields, initiator of the Fields Medal; it included a roundtrip railway excursion to Vancouver and ferry to Victoria. The first two Fields Medals were awarded at the 1936 ICM in Oslo.

In the aftermath of World War I, at the insistence of the Allied Powers, the 1920 ICM in Strasbourg and the 1924 ICM in Toronto excluded mathematicians from the countries formerly comprising the Central Powers. This resulted in a still unresolved controversy as to whether to count the Strasbourg and Toronto congresses as true ICMs. At the opening of the 1932 ICM in Zurich, Hermann Weyl said: "We attend here to an extraordinary improbable event. For the number of n, corresponding to the just opened International Congress of Mathematicians, we have the inequality 7 ≤ n ≤ 9; unfortunately our axiomatic foundations are not sufficient to give a more precise statement”. As a consequence of this controversy, from the 1932 Zurich congress onward, the ICMs are not numbered.

For the 1950 ICM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Laurent Schwartz, one of the Fields Medalists for that year, and Jacques Hadamard, both of whom were viewed by the U.S. authorities as communist sympathizers, were only able to obtain U.S. visas after the personal intervention of President Harry Truman.

The first woman to give an ICM plenary lecture, at the 1932 congress in Zurich, was Emmy Noether. The second ICM plenary talk by a woman was delivered 58 years later, at the 1990 ICM in Kyoto, by Karen Uhlenbeck.

The 1998 congress was attended by 3,346 participants. The American Mathematical Society reported that more than 4,500 participants attended the 2006 conference in Madrid, Spain. The King of Spain presided over the 2006 conference opening ceremony. The 2010 Congress took place in Hyderabad, India on August 19–27, 2010. The ICM 2014 will be held in Seoul, South Korea.