Fields Medal Kontsevich began to prepare for the greatest challenge of his life: presenting the 2004 Moursand Lectures at the U of O.
    The first Moursand Lecture consisted of definitions and "basic" examples.  He began by defining a sort of affine manifold on which the coordinate charts were related by an affine linear transformation in the regions in which they overlapped, as opposed to say by a diffeomorphism, as in the case of a differentiable manifold.  I think this is about the only thing that I understood, but realizing my situation early on, I decided to instead look out for exciting non-mathematical content.  That was an utter and total failure, but here goes anyway:
Highlights:
1) The guy can draw.  He drew a sunflower to illustrate the Fibonacci numbers, which looked quite a lot like one of those designs produced by a Spirograph.  Then, 15 minutes later, just in case anybody was thinking his artistic abilities were limited to geometrical patterns, he drew a pretty impressive cartoon snail.
2) He has a sense of humor (or the alternative interpretation, which explains my choice of quotes, namely that I do not.).  After producing some sort of sphere with 24 singularities he exclaimed "so, it's all very elementary", and earlier, after referring to something as a "focus-focus", as if that would clarify matters, he said "don't ask me what does it mean".
3) The hype.  He spent the first part of the lecture giving definitions, and results without proof.  At one point, after stating another theorem, he went on to tell us that a student of his tried for an entire year to prove it and failed, and so it was no easy theorem.  He then proceeded to give his own proof.
Well, so ends the tour de force, which is my magnum opus on the life and times of Maxim Kontsevich. (Material plagiarized from various Internet sources, most notably http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/news-centre/en/pur/01-03-pur01.html)

    Kontsevich was born near Moscow in 1964.  His parents were well educated.  He has one older brother who is a researcher in computer imaging.  It is to his brother and a few good books to which he says he owes his fascination with mathematics.  He has influenced many fields, but his main interests seem to be algebraic geometry and mathematical physics, more specifically quantum field theories.  "...it is not the possible applications of a particular field of physics or technology which interests him, nor the rigour of mathematical demonstrations. What Maxim Kontsevich likes in mathematics is what he calls its 'beauty'. And especially the beauty of the structures he discovers in it."
    He was first recognized mathematically at the age of 16 when he ranked 2nd in the mathematics Olympiad, an international mathematics competition for high school students.  He received his Ph.D. from Bonn University for research in mathematical physics in 1992.  In 1998 he, along with three other eminent mathematicians, received the Fields Medal.  This award, something like a Nobel Prize for mathematicians, is awarded every 4 years to a mathematician(s) under the age of 40.  As an interesting side note, Andrew Wiles, famous for proving  Fermat's last theorem (not to be confused with Fermat's little theorem, this one is a monster, but not to be confused with the monster group, which is a finite simple group with roughly 10⁵⁴ elements, which Kontsevich joked might be the mathematical object which acted on one mathematical space which I did not understand to produce another mathematical space which I did not understand.  Now Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln, but I digress.) thought he had finished his proof at age 39, and would have surely received the fields medal, but it turned out that he had made a mistake which he only corrected a year later, too late to receive the prize.  After receiving the

by Nathan Collins