Mathematical research today and tomorrow. Viewpoints of seven Fields Medalists. Lectures given at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Spain, June 13--18, 1991 (Q1202201)

The articles of this volume will not be indexed individually. These lectures by seven Fields medailists were given in Barcelona as a part of several cultural events preceding the 1992 Olympic Games. The main goal was to give an impression of the current state and of prospects of mathematics. Being addressed to a general audience they are all expository. Some of them are prepared directly from videotapes and are therefore closer to the original narrative text but not less appealing. \textit{René Thom} describes how he had to cope with the burden of being a fields medailist and how he gradually drifted from a mathematician to a philosopher. This development was landmarked by two important books resuming the two main stages. His view of mathematical modelling of the real world by dynamical systems, in particular, by gradient systems (classified as the seven elementary catastrophes) is laid down in ``Structural Stability and Morphogenesis''. The importance of the notion of analogy which can be traced back to Artistotle is resumed in ``Semio- Physics''. \textit{Sergei Novikov} reviews his mathematical career from the days when he entered university in the mid-fifties. He reports on the contact he had with many other mathematicians and also physicists from whom he learned and with whom he shared his ideas. (Note that the ``strange person'' Walter he mentions is better known as Vol'pert.) The second part of his talk deals with integrable models, in particular, with soliton theory that arose from the study of the Korteweg-de Vries equation. \textit{Shing-Tung Yau} gives a general survey about recent promising developments in geometry and analysis. He concentrates on four points: analysis on infinite dimensional manifolds (which is strongly influenced by theoretical physics), singularities (in algebraic geometry, differential equations and in general relativity), the classification of geometric structures, and finally classical differential geometry where the imbedding problem is still one of the most important ones for current and future research. \textit{Alain Connes'} talk is a survey on his own work and on joint work with several co-workers dealing with applications of noncommutative geometry in topology and in particle physics. It is a summary of his recent book ``Géométrie Non Commutative'' (Paris 1990) dealing with these topics (cf. my review in Zbl 0745.46067). \textit{Stephen Smales} talk is a non-technical introduction to the theory of computation, more precisely, to the algorithmic solution of equations (e.g. systems of real or complex polynomials). It is mainly based on joint work with \textit{L. Blum} and \textit{M. Shub}; cf. their survey article in [Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. New Ser. 21, No. 1, 1-46 (1989; Zbl 0681.03020)]. The same purpose underlies, \textit{Vaughan Jones'} talk about knots and their application in mathematics and physics; cf. his survey talk at the ICM in Kyoto (1990). \textit{Gerd Faltings} reports on the progress of Diophantic geometry summarizing recent work on Diophantic approximation by himself [Ann. Math., II. Ser. 133, No. 3, 549-576 (1991; Zbl 0734.14007)] and by \textit{P. Vojta} [Ann. Math., II. Ser. 133, No. 3, 509-548 (1991)], and giving some insight into the relation between Fermat's conjecture and elliptic curves as discovered by G. Frey. The Lecture Notes volume ends with a round-table discussion on the nature of mathematics.