ONE of the oft-cited reasons for Alfred Nobel not instituting an award for mathematics is that the famous Swedish mathematician Gosta Miagnus Mittag-Leffler had run off with Nobel's wife. Though there is no evidence to support this story - because Nobel never married - it has assumed a life of its own. One comes across different versions of this: that the woman was not Nobel's wife but the one he had proposed to or that she was his mistress and so on.
Another story is that Mittag-Leffler, in the process of accumulating considerable wealth, had antagonised Nobel. Nobel, afraid that Mittag-Leffler might win the prize for mathematics, did not institute a prize for mathematics. This also seems far-fetched as there were greater mathematicians such as Henri Poincare and David Hilbert around at that time.
Both the apocryphal stories were debunked in an article by mathematicians Lars Garding and Lars Hormander in the journal Mathemetics Intelligencer in 1985. According to them, Mittag-Leffler and Nobel had almost no relation to each other. Nobel migrated to Paris in 1865 when Mittag-Leffler was still a student and rarely returned to visit Sweden. There is no evidence of any animosity between them either. In fact, during Nobel's last years Mittag-Leffler is known to have been engaged in persuading Nobel to designate a substantial part of his fortune to Stockholm Hogskola (which later became Stockholm Universitet). Apparently, Nobel had originally intended to do this but eventually formed the Foundation much to the disappointment of Hogskola. Following this, academic rivals of Mittag-Leffler at Hogskola alleged that it was Nobel's dislike for Mittag-Leffler that made him change his mind. This incident could have contributed to the prevalent myth with juicy bits thrown in.
"The true answer," say Garding and Hormander, "is that, for natural reasons, the thought of a prize in mathematics never entered Nobel's mind." Nobel's final will bequeathed $9 million for a foundation whose income would support five annual prizes in fields which, except for medicine, were close to Nobel's interests. Economics was added in 1969. He perhaps simply did not care much for mathematics because it was not considered a practical science, which could benefit humanity (a chief purpose of creating the Nobel Foundation). His will speaks of prizes for those "inventions or discoveries" of greatest practical benefit to mankind.
As Peter Ross points out in Math Horizons (1985), "with the blossoming of computer science, statistics and applied mathematics in addition to mathematics itself, a strong case could be made for a new Nobel Prize in the mathematical sciences".
R. RamachandranCOMMents
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