Anybody ever win one of each?
I doubt it; there is no Nobel prize in mathematics (one reason why there IS a Fields medal), and I can’t find any cite for anyone winning both (which I find hard to imagine anyway – the rules are different for the two, and they reward different sorts of work).
At this point in my career, I’m pretty resigned to having to pick up mine on eBay.
None of the Fields Medallists to date have also won a Nobel Prize.
Actually, I’d guess that any eventual overlap might be because of one winning the Nobel Prize for Economics. Nash was a plausible Fields contender in his day and I suspect Ito (who served on the 1986 Fields committee) has been considered for both.
Or Physics presumbaly?
Umm, I was taking it for granted that most peoples’ assumption would be that it’d be a Physics winner involved. Hence the way I phrased my comment.
And here I was thinking that this was about Mittag-Leffler, again.
You must have missed II Gyan II comment.
Quite the opposite - II Gyan II was making exactly the assumption I was questioning.
I’ve heard that the greatest roadblock to Witten winning a Nobel Prize is the fact that M-Theory may not receive experimental confirmation within his lifetime (and Noble Prizes aren’t awarded posthumously – unless you die between the time you’re chosen as the winner and the presentation of the actual award.)
One roadblock to someone winning both awards is that the Fields Medal is not given to anyone over 40. So if the significance of someone’s work isn’t fully recognized until later in their career (or, of course, if they only do their most significant work after the age of 40) they might miss their window of opportunity to win the Fields Medal.
It makes sense (for the age limit reason I mentioned above) to look for people who could win both awards among living Fields Medal winners (rather than among Nobel Laureates).
With that (and bonzer’s suggestion that they might win the Economics prize) in mind, a relevant question seems to be Which of the living Fields Medal recipients has made the most significant contributions to economics?
No doubt largely because of the age limit, virtually all of the Fields Medallists to date are still alive. The one who springs to mind as having tried to work seriously on economics is Stephen Smale - though I’ve no idea how economists rate his stuff.
I strongly suspect that if anybody ever does the double, it’ll be for different pieces of work, regardless of what specific Nobel is involved. Smale’s papers on economics postdate his Fields Medal and much of the work that Nash realistically hoped would win him it had nothing to do with game theory.
Even with Witten, he did important work in QCD in the early part of his career that has relatively little to do with his more mathematical contributions. To be slightly provocative - again - his best shot at a Nobel may remain that someone turns up some naturally occuring strange matter and he gets to share a prize with Arnold Bodmer.
It’s obviously extremely difficult to contribute at this level in several different areas, but it does happen - particularly when we’ve restricted our attention to such an inherently extreme sample of people as the Fields Medallists.