Le 29e International Congress of Mathematicians is being held from July 6 to 14, in a reduced format and mainly by videoconference, in Helsinki – the holding of the event in Saint Petersburg was canceled following the invasion of Ukraine by the Russia. “There was a consensus in the community not to organize this conference in Russia”recalls Hugo Duminil-Copin, the new French winner of the Fields Medal, awarded every four years during this congress and endowed with 15,000 Canadian dollars (approximately 11,000 euros).
“Once again a French mathematician has enriched the collection of our awards. This obliges us to remain attractive to high-level scientists, if we want this to continue”greets Sylvie Retailleau, Minister of Higher Education and Research.
In addition to this 36-year-old probabilist, professor at the Institute for Higher Scientific Studies (IHES, in Bures-sur-Yvette) and at the University of Geneva, a 37-year-old Ukrainian, Maryna Viazovska, professor at the School Federal Polytechnic of Lausanne (EPFL). She is only the second woman to receive this award, out of 62 men. The first, Iranian Maryam Mirzakhani, medalist in 2014 died three years later.
American June Huh, 39, from the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton, and Briton James Maynard, 35, from Oxford University, complete the list.
Maryna Viazovska left Ukraine in 2010 for Germany, where she completed her thesis under the supervision of Don Zagier and Werner Müller at the University of Bonn. After postdocs in Berlin and Princeton, she was recruited by EPFL in 2016, to the chair of arithmetic the following year. His prize notably rewards two demonstrations relating to the best way of stacking spheres, that is to say the one being the most compact. If the solution is known in three dimensions, a pyramid, as the market gardeners do on their stall, it was not in higher dimensions. Worse, while the “pyramid” remains a solution in dimensions 4, 5 and up to 7, this is no longer the case in dimension 8.
Spheres and spaces
Everything happens as if by increasing the dimensions, the spaces between spheres became large enough to accommodate other spheres. The recipe in dimension 8 is called E8, the name of a well-known group, which only Maryna Viazovska showed, in 2016, that it represented the best solution. Seven days later, with other colleagues, she posted another article showing that in dimension 24, too, the pyramid is not optimal. In 2019, with these same colleagues, she generalized the result by showing that E8 also represents an optimal way of arranging points in space. Before the Fields Medal, she had received many distinctions such as the Salem Prize (2016), the New Horizons Prize (2018), the European Mathematical Society Prize (2020).
You have 37.44% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.