I didn't go through special schools and olympiads. I came via studying economics and army service. I had a family before papers. As a result, my mind is probably not as quick as it could have been with an early drilling in math. But perhaps I also had some advantages over my younger classmates. I had a broader view of the universe and a better idea about the place of mathematics in it. This helped me form my own opinion about what is important, beautiful, promising, etc.

Growing up in Kirillov's seminar, I had in its participants, especially in Grisha Ol'shanskii, wonderful teachers who generously invested their time and talent into explaining mathematics and who patiently followed my first professional steps. I can't imagine becoming a mathematician without them. So it must be that in this respect my professional formation resembles everybody else's.

We prove an integration formula involving Jack polynomials conjectured by I P Goulden and D M Jackson in connection with enumeration of maps in surfaces.

Andrei Okounkov ... contributed greatly to the field of asymptotic combinatorics. An extremely versatile mathematician, he found a wide array of applications of his methods. His early results include a proof of a conjecture of Ol'shanskii on the representations theory of groups with infinite-dimensional duals. Okounkov gave the first proof of the celebrated Baik-Deift-Johansson conjecture, which states that the asymptotics of random partitions distributed according to the Plancherel measure coincides with that of the eigenvalues of large Hermitian matrices. An important and influential result of Okounkov is a formula he found in joint work with Borodin, which expresses a general Toeplitz determinant as the Fredholm determinant of the product of two associated Hankel operators. The new techniques of working with random partitions invented and successfully developed by Okounkov lead to a striking array of applications in a wide variety of fields: topology of module spaces, ergodic theory, the theory of random surfaces and algebraic geometry.

For his contributions bridging probability, representation theory and algebraic geometry.

The work of Andrei Okounkov has revealed profound new connections between different areas of mathematics and has brought new insights into problems arising in physics. Although his work is difficult to classify because it touches on such a variety of areas, two clear themes are the use of notions of randomness and of classical ideas from representation theory. This combination has proven powerful in attacking problems from algebraic geometry and statistical mechanics.

Out of a whole spectrum of thoughts that I had in the time since receiving the phone call from the President of the International Mathematical Union, two are especially recurrent. First, this is a great honour and it means a great responsibility. At times, I feel overwhelmed by both. Second, I can't wait to share this recognition with my friends and collaborators. Mathematics is both a personal and collective endeavour: while ideas are born in individual heads, the exchange of ideas is just as important for progress. I was very fortunate to work with many brilliant mathematician who also became my close personal friends. This is our joint success.

I personally don't know how one can understand something without both thinking about it quietly over and over and discussing it with friends. When I feel puzzled, I like long walks or bike rides. I like to be alone with my computer playing with formulas or experimenting with code. But when I finally have an idea, I can't wait to share it with others. I am so fortunate to be able to share my work and my excitement about it with many brilliant people who are at the same time wonderful friends.

One of his greatest strengths is his amazing versatility. He works in many different fields of mathematics and succeeds in taking results from one area and applying them in a seemingly quite different field.