The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 26

4
W.F. Shadwick
This is a brief sketch of what I remember about the critical
points in the creation of the Fields Institute and the pivotal
contributions to it. While writing it, I have been on a different
continent from my records of the time. I apologize to anyone
who has been unintentionally slighted in this account and hope
to correct any such lapses in an extended version in future.
Ontario Centres of Excellence but Not in
Mathematics
In the winter of the 1985–86 academic year, at a meeting
of the University of Waterloo Mathematics Faculty Council,
Waterloo’s plans were announced for participation in a new
program of research entitled the “Centres of Excellence,”
initiated and funded by the Province of Ontario.
No consideration had been given to mathematics as a
potential area of research to be supported in this program.
I thought this was especially odd given that Waterloo
had the singular distinction of having an entire faculty
devoted to mathematics and was home to several first-rate
mathematicians.
I was perhaps the only mathematician in Canada at that
time who had been both a Member of the Institute for
Advanced Study (IAS) and the new Mathematical Sciences
Research Institute (MSRI) at Berkeley. So, while there were
others who had been members of IAS—“The Institute,” as
it was known in those days —and knew what a tremendous
resource it was, there was far less awareness of the new model
that the Berkeley Institute provide d.
MSRI had demonstrated that a visiting member institute
with no permanent faculty could generate research programs
as fruitful as those at the IAS without the need for a modern
equivalent of the Institute for Advanced Study’s wealthy
founding benefactors.