not so fast, don't check out cheap fares to Stockholm yet

Don't rush out and buy your new outfit for accepting your Nobel Math Prize in Stockholm.

There is no Nobel Math Prize. Ça n'existe pas.

Nobel got fabulously wealthy from inventing dynamite. Meanwhile, all his life he hated this Norwegian mathematician like poison. When he was setting up his foundation, he asked his consultants if there was any chance that if he endowed a Math Prize, the guy he hated like poison might ever win it. His consultants said, "Well, yeah, he really is a pretty brilliant mathematician, he could win the prize maybe, it could happen."

So Nobel said: No math prize.

(That's either True, or Not True.)

But write your acceptance speech anyway and post it here. And what the hell, buy an outfit.

The math equivalent of the Nobel Prize is the Fields Medal, awarded every four years, and it has an odd quirk: You gotta do your Brilliant Math Thing before age 40.

Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem when he was 41, I think. No prize. Sucks for him.

Who could hate a guy for proving Fermat's Last Theorem?

Trekkies hate Wiles. In several episodes of ST/TNG, Jean-Luc Picard's off-duty hobby, hundreds of years from now, was (is? will be?) to try to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. While ST/TNG was still in its original broadcasts, Wiles proved FLT. It was all a lie. Now we know that in those episodes, Jean-Luc is just surfing for porn.

Speech! Speech!