The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 14

xii
Elaine McKinnon Riehm
American tradition and partnerships with private industry. He
discovered, however, that Canadians were not then inclined
to donate generously to scientific research in the manner
of Andrew Carnegie and that Canadian industries were not
inclined to establish research laboratories such as that of
Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York. Fields’ conclusion
was that scientific research in Canada would have to depend
on the largesse of provincial and federal governments and
that scientists must therefore develop persuasive arguments
on behalf of science.
It was said that Fields was tiresome on the subject of
the responsibility of governments to support science. In the
summer of 1914, on board the S.S. Orvieto with a large
cohort of scientists heading to Australia for meetings of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science, Fields sat
at dinner one night next to Scottish mathematician J.E.A.
Steggall, who recorded rather grumpily in his diary, “Professor
Fields sat by me and harangued about the endowment of
research: he seems to think that governments should make
no limit to their expenditure in this direction.” 1
In 1906, John Charles Fields published the first
mathematical research monograph by a Canadian
mathematician.
Because no Canadian printer at the
time could typeset the mathematics, his book was published
in Sweden with the help of his friend Gösta Mittag-Leffler.
Entitled the Theory of the Algebraic Functions of a Complex
Variable, it drew acclaim in the Canadian press, although
always with the disclaimer that the non-mathematical
reviewer had not understood it. More widely, however,
it received only modest notice in mathematical reviews,
likely because the techniques Fields used were already being
surpassed by modern mathematics. Still, his book earned
1
My thanks to Frances Hoffman for her discovery of the J.E.A. Steggall
diary in the Mitchell Library, City of Glasgow Archives.