Winners of the 1998 Fields Medal award in mathematics were recently announced at the International Congress of Mathematics held in Berlin, Germany. One of the four recipients was Maxim Kontsevich, who was a speaker at the ICTP Trieste Conference on S-Duality and Mirror Symmetry in 1995. Kontsevich's research has focused on string theory and quantum field theory. Specifically, he has provided the mathematical equivalence of two models of quantum gravitation first conjectured by the famed physicist Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The Fields Medal is mathematics' equivalent to the Nobel Prize.