Helsinki. Four mathematicians were awarded the Fields Medal in Helsinki on Tuesday, including Ukraine’s Maryna Viazovska, the second woman to receive the prestigious award since its inception in 1936.
The other three winners of this distinction considered the equivalent of a “Nobel in mathematics” are the Frenchman Hugo Duminil-Copin, the British James Maynard and the American-South Korean June Huh.
The gold medal, which is awarded every four years accompanied by a check for 15,000 Canadian dollars (just over 11,500 US dollars), rewards “exceptional findings” by researchers under 40 years of age.
The announcement was made at a ceremony held in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, during the International Congress of Mathematicians.
The ceremony was initially planned in Saint Petersburg, but was moved to Helsinki due to the invasion of Ukraine.
“The brutal war that Russia continues to wage against Ukraine left no alternative,” lamented the president of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) Carlos Kenig.
“My life changed forever”
Maryna Viazovska is the second woman to win this prestigious medal in its 80 years of existence.
Viazovska was born in 1984 in Ukraine, when it was still part of the Soviet Union.
She is currently a professor at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne, Switzerland, since 2017.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February “my life changed forever,” Viazovska said.
He was awarded the prize for solving a version of a centuries-old geometric problem, in which he demonstrated the densest packing of identical spheres in eight dimensions.
The “sphere packing problem” dates back to the 16th century, when the question was raised of how cannonballs should be stacked to get the densest possible solution.
The jury made the decision before the war broke out.
The first woman to receive the Fields Medal was Maryam Mirzakhani in 2014, an Iranian mathematician who died three years later after a battle with cancer.
The works of the Frenchman Duminil-Copin, 36, focus on the mathematical branch of statistical physics. He is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, near Paris, and the University of Geneva.
He was awarded for having solved “long-standing problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions”, which, according to the jury, has opened several new research directions.
“Congratulations! This award shows the vitality and excellence of our French School of Mathematics,” President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Twitter.
James Maynard, 35, is a professor at Oxford University in the UK. He received the medal “for (his) contributions of his to analytic number theory, which have enabled important advances in the understanding of the structure of the prime numbers and in the Diophantine approach”.
June Huh, 39, a professor at Princeton University in the United States, received the award for “transforming” the field of geometric combinatorics, “using methods from Hodge’s theory, tropical geometry and singularity theory “said the jury.
Tropical geometry is named after the pioneer of the discipline, the Brazilian computer scientist Imre Simon, who died in 2009.
#Ukraine #Maryna #Viazovska #wins #Nobel #mathematics