The Ukrainian Maryna Viazovska has won, along with three other mathematicians, the Medalla Fields 2022 , a prestigious prize in the field of mathematics given to talents under the age of 40 for their “exceptional discoveries”. The other winners are the British mathematician James Maynard the American June Huh and the french Hugo Duminil-Copin as announced by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) at a ceremony in Helsinki (Finland).
Viazovska, who works at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, is the second woman to win the award since its creation in 1936. Her best-known work is Solving the Problem for pack spheres so that its arrangement occupies most of the volume, similar to how oranges are packed on trays in a grocery store, in eight dimensions.
This is a geometric problem that dates back to the 16th century, when the question of how cannonballs should be stacked to get the densest possible solution was raised.
Viazovska was born in 1984 in Ukraine, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. With the Russian invasion of her country in February “my life changed forever,” she said. The jury made the decision on her recognition before the outbreak of the war.
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.
transfer due to war
The Fields, considered the ‘Nobel of mathematics’, are usually announced at the opening of the International Congress of Mathematics (ICM), which takes place every four years. This time it was scheduled to start on July 6 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, but was scrapped after the invasion of Ukraine in February. The award ceremony has been moved to Helsinki and the congress will be held virtually.
“The brutal war that Russia continues to wage against Ukraine left no alternative,” lamented the president of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) Carlos Kenig.
Maryna Viazovska, James Maynard, June Huh and Hugo Duminil-Copin, during the ceremony in Helsinki
As for the rest of the winners, the works of the Frenchman Duminil-Copin, 36, focus on the mathematical branch of statistical physics. He is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies, near Paris, and the University of Geneva.
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 prime numbers.”
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 the theory of singularity » said the jury. Tropical geometry is named after the pioneer of the discipline, the Brazilian computer scientist Imre Simon, who died in 2009.
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