You mean like Kontsevich, Borcherds or Okounkov?

This is why I need an emoticon for ironic understatement.

You mean like Kontsevich, Borcherds or Okounkov?

(Of course none of them received the Fields medal for solely string related work, but string theory figures into the work of all of them.)

Also, to push what Jon H said a little farther, I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if experimental work motivated by the AdS/CFT correspondence became Prizeworthy in the next decade or so. I’m reluctant to give betting odds, but let’s say I think they’re better than five-to-one. More importantly, given the large number of collaborators on modern particle-physics projects, I expect we’d see some (ahem) interesting politics when the nomination time came around.

Finally, isn’t it generally true that theorists get their Prizes after a significantly longer wait than experimentalists? (I was at MIT to witness both Ketterle and Wilczek get their rewards. . . .)

Does that include important or useful results that come up in the course of that work but are don’t actually move the ball towards the string theory goal posts?

ie, “We were working on blah blah and while it was a dead end in terms of string theory, we figured out how to make these wonderfully useful pocket universes, into which we can dump all our waste and excess carbon.”