John Milnor at ICM 2014

International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 每四年舉辦一次，是數學界最大也是最知名的會議，數學家 Timothy Gowers 在其部落格詳細地記錄聽過的演講，其中一段很有趣也很動人，拓撲學家 John Milnor 在 Abel Lecture 發表演說，談論四個世紀以來拓撲學的發展，預計從2維曲面，3維流形，最後再接到4維流形，可是講到4維流形時，居然只剩2分鐘，於是他問主持人該麼辦，主持人回說你想講多久就講多久。主持人的回應是很出人意料的，聽眾通常希望演講準時結束(上課也是一樣)，如果時間受到拖延，台下觀眾的目光往往會讓給主持人及講者感到壓力。但這場演講不同，大家都想都知道4維流形的發展，於是當主持人決定延長時間時，聽眾回以熱烈的掌聲。Gowers說他從未有類似的經驗。(我也是，好想躬逢其盛啊！) 原文如下：

As one would expect from Milnor, the talk was a beautiful one. In traditional fashion, he talked about surfaces, then 3-manifolds, and finally 4-manifolds. I think he may even have started in one dimension with a discussion of the bridges-of-Königsberg problem, but my memory of that is hazy. Anyhow, an indication of just how beautiful the talk was is what happened at the end. He misjudged the time, leaving himself about two minutes to discuss 4-manifolds. So he asked the chairman what he should do about it, and the chairman (who was Helge Holden) told him to take as much time as he wanted. Normally that would be the cause for hate rays to emanate towards the chairman and the speaker from the brains of almost the entire audience. But with this talk, the idea of missing out on the 4-manifold equivalent of what we had just heard for 2-manifolds and 3-manifolds was unthinkable, and there was a spontaneous burst of applause for the decision. I’ve never seen anything like it.