the second woman to win the Fields Medal. The dedication of a lesson to a colleague killed in Kharkiv, Yulia Zdanovska. When someone like her dies, as if the future died
Mathematics has a new star. Ukraine Maryna Viazovska the second woman to win the Fields medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics (with the difference that young talents under 40 are awarded). Before her she had only succeeded l’iraniana Maryam Mirzakhaniwho died prematurely in 2017. The passing of the ideal baton between these two brilliant minds also brings with it the burden of representing a model for all girls fascinated by equations and symmetrieseager to join a club that is still too masculine.
The greengrocer’s dilemma
Viazovska’s most important contribution concerns a seemingly trivial problem: what is the most efficient way to pack as many balls into a box as possible? We can think of it as the greengrocer’s dilemma, who not by chance arranges the oranges in a pyramid, but was proposed in Elizabethan England with cannonballs. This conjecture has long challenged human intelligence, starting with the astronomer Kepler, in a saga of variants and attempts at proofs. The question can also be asked for worlds with a number of dimensions higher than the three we are used toand it was in this challenge that Maryna shone.
Questions and answers
In one of the few video interviews released before the award, she was asked what she was passionate about about her work and she replied that in his field of investigation asking the questions easy, finding the answers very difficult. Curiously, according to what he stated, the solution for 8 dimensions and 24 turned out to be simpler than for three.
Path
Viazovska’s love of mathematics was early, raised in a Kiev school for gifted children, then he took her to Germany, then to Switzerland at the Polytechnic University of Lausanne where he teaches number theory. Finally to the medal, which this year also went to a British, a Korean-American and a Frenchman. James Maynard, June Huh e Hugo Duminil-Copin they distinguished themselves for research on prime numbers, combinatorics and phase transitions, respectively. The award ceremony was supposed to take place in Russia, but was moved to Helsinki.
The colleague killed
Ukraine known for the excellence of its mathematics schools, so it is not surprising that the International Mathematical Union – which chose the quartet of winners before the military aggression – awarded a scholar born in Kiev. Recently Maryna dedicated one of her lessons to a young colleague from Kharkiv killed by a missile attack: Yulia Zdanovska. When someone like her dies, as if the future died.
July 5, 2022 (change July 6, 2022 | 08:08)
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