Journey of Lars Ahlfors’ Fields Medal

Background. Lars Ahlfors was one of the two recipients of the inaugural Fields Medal in 1936. In 1991, Donald Albers visited the Ahlfors family cottage in Maine to speak to the then 84-year-old mathematician. The interview was published in The College Mathematics Journal in March 1998, after Ahlfors’ death on October 11, 1996. In the February 1998 issue of Notices of the AMS, Steven Krantz recounted a story Ahlfors had told Albers about pawning his Fields Medal during World War II, but the article inadvertently identified Sweden as Switzerland. In the Harvard faculty meeting minutes dated October 17, 2000, Raoul Bott and his colleagues repeated Krantz’s account. Since then, the story of Ahlfors’ Fields Medal has become an “apocrypha,” as Krantz characterized it. In June 2025, I contacted Ahlfors’ second daughter, Vanessa Gruen, to clarify the circumstances surrounding the first-ever Fields Medal, which Vanessa and her younger sister Caroline eventually inherited. My research, based on existing biographical accounts of Lars Ahlfors and my interview with Ahlfors’ daughter, forms the basis of the following story.