Fields Medal 1950: Winners

Recipients

1. Laurent Schwartz

   Math

   Developed the theory of distributions, a new notion of generalized function motivated by the Dirac delta-function of theoretical physics.

2. Atle Selberg

   Math

   Developed generalizations of the sieve methods of Viggo Brun; achieved major results on zeros of the Riemann zeta function; gave an elementary proof of the prime number theorem (with P. Erdős), with a generalization to prime numbers in an arbitrary arithmetic progression.