Aug. 25: A resistance among mathematicians to tweak a long-established name of the top award in their subject appears to be posing a hurdle for attempts to raise the quantum of the prize money that comes with it.

The International Mathematical Union (IMU) has declined an informal proposal from India to help raise the amount of prize money for its Fields Medal if it adds the name of India’s 20th century math genius Srinivasa Ramanujam to the award title, mathematicians said.

The IMU has been discussing possible options through which the prize money for the Fields Medal could be increased from the current level of Canadian $15,000 (Rs 6.6 lakh), said a senior IMU official at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad.

The Fields Medal, given exclusively for outstanding achievements in mathematics, carries the prestige of a Nobel Prize whose value is much higher — over US $1.3 million (Rs 6.1 crore) in 2009. The medal, awarded every four years since 1936 at the ICM, a quadrennial event, has been named after Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields who had specified a fund for the award in his will before he died in August 1932.

A senior Indian mathematician said he had informally proposed to the IMU that he would try and convince the Indian government to provide funds to increase the Fields Medal prize money if it would consider changing the name to the Fields-Ramanujam Medal.

“A somewhat similar proposal earlier from a commercial entity in Canada had not worked out,” Prof. Madabusi Santanam Raghunathan, the chairman of the executive organising committee of ICM 2010, said. “The change in name was not acceptable.”

Senior IMU officials said the earlier proposal from the Canadian organisation had also been circulated among former Fields Medal winners. “All but one agreed that there should be no change in the name,” said one official.

“I’m not at liberty to disclose the identity of the organisation,” said Laszlo Lovasz, the IMU president. “But there was a process of consultations within the IMU and among the Fields Medal winners, and it emerged that there should be no change in the name.”

Lovasz said he had heard of the Indian proposal but indicated that it was only an informal idea.

“We had hoped the addition of the name of Ramanujam, who’s associated with pure academics, would be acceptable,” said Raghunathan, a senior mathematician at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.

Ramanujam has been hailed as one of India’s greatest mathematical geniuses, largely self-taught, who contributed significantly to several branches of the field, surprising British mathematicians in the early 20th century.

Raghunathan said he had discussed the proposal with a senior Indian science policy maker and would have approached the Indian government formally if he had received a positive signal from the IMU community.