One of the four awardees is Ukrainian Maryna Vjazovska, who is only the second woman to receive the Fields Medal. The other awardees are Hugo Duminil-Copin, June Huh and James Maynard.
A year The 2022 Fields Medal will be awarded to four mathematicians: Hugo Duminil-Copin, June Huh, James Maynard and Maryna Vyazovska. The Fields medals are equal in prestige to the Nobel prizes.
The medals will be awarded today in Helsinki at Aalto University’s Töölö ballroom, where the attention of the world’s mathematicians has turned.
Opportunity was originally supposed to be held in St. Petersburg. However, Russia’s attack on Ukraine caused the International Mathematical Union IMU to stop preparations and move the world’s largest mathematics conference to the ICM virtual conference online.
Therefore, a full-scale conference of thousands of mathematicians will not be organized in Helsinki. However, this is where the opening ceremony of the conference takes place, and the presentation of the Fields medals is part of the opening event of ICM 2022. The event was opened by the president Sauli Niinistö.
At first, the president of Russia was supposed to be the one who opened the conference in St. Petersburg Vladimir Putin.
Medals awarded at the ICM conferences held every four years to deserving mathematicians under 40 years of age. Two to four medals can be distributed at once.
In practice, it has become customary to award four medals, as it were, one per year.
Ukrainian Maryna Vjazovska (b.1984) is only the second woman to be awarded the Fields Medal. He became famous in 2016 for presenting a way to pack identical balls as tightly as possible in an eight-dimensional space.
Later, Vjazovska continued her work together with other mathematicians by presenting a way to pack spheres also in 24-dimensional space.
The question of the most compact way to pack balls is a mathematical problem inherited from the 17th century. The so-called Kepler problem was solved in three-dimensional space only in 1998.
However, Vjazovska’s solution to the eight-dimensional space was a complete surprise to the mathematical world, says the professor of mathematics at the University of Helsinki Tuomo Kuusi.
“It came like a bolt from a clear sky. Vjazovska’s solution combines two very different branches of mathematics, analytic number theory and geometry. In addition, it is simply beautiful.”
Since we cannot even perceive spaces in more than three dimensions, the question of packing balls in higher dimensions may sound trivial. However, Vyazovka’s work has also aroused interest among physicists working with string theory.
Vjazovska works as a professor at the Lausanne University of Technology in Switzerland.
Opening are an invited party. HS follows the distribution of awards live.
On Wednesday, the awardees will give presentations on the most current and pioneering mathematical research in the Töölö auditorium of Aalto University. These lectures are also broadcast live on the IMU website.
Canadian a mathematician of John Charles Fields (1863–1932) medals have been awarded since 1936. In Finland, the medals are now awarded for the second time. The first time was in 1978, when a mathematics conference was organized in Helsinki.
The Finnish mathematician has received the medal once, in 1936, when Lars Ahlfors (1907–1996) received one of the two medals awarded the first time.
The recipients of the medal are chosen by the International Mathematical Union’s Prize Committee. The medal is accompanied by a cash prize worth 15,000 Canadian dollars (about 11,000 euros).
Sixty mathematicians have received the medal. So far, there is only one woman among the laureates, an Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhaniwho received the award in 2014. She died at age 40 of breast cancer in 2017.
The previous one once the medals were awarded at the ICM 2018 conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. That’s when the occasion took a nasty turn when a Kurdish mathematician Caucher Birkari the award medal was stolen just half an hour after the medal was awarded.
The briefcase containing the medal was later found empty, but the medal has not been found.
Fields in addition to the medal, several other prizes in the field of mathematics are also awarded at the ICM opening ceremony.
Of interest to Finns is the Abacus prize for mathematical computing, which is sponsored by the University of Helsinki and the American Simons Foundation.
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