Ukrainian mathematician becomes second woman to win prestigious Fields Medal

[NNadir]

From Nature News: Ukrainian mathematician becomes second woman to win prestigious Fields Medal

Subtitle:

Maryna Viazovska, who works on the geometry of spheres, is one of four winners of the coveted prize this year.

Davide Castelvecchi, Nature July 5, 2022

Excerpt:

Ukrainian number theorist Maryna Viazovska is among the four winners of the 2022 Fields Medals, one of the highest honours in mathematics that is conventionally awarded to people aged under 40. The other winners are James Maynard, a number theorist at the University of Oxford, UK; June Huh, a specialist in combinatorics at Princeton University in New Jersey; and Hugo Duminil-Copin, who studies statistical physics at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) near Paris. The International Mathematical Union (IMU) announced the winners at an award ceremony in Helsinki on 5 July.

“All of the medalists are incredibly deserving and talented, showcasing the vibrancy of mathematical research across the globe,” says Bryna Kra, a mathematician at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who is president-elect of the American Mathematical Society.

Viazovska, who is based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), is the second woman ever to earn the award. She is best known for her solution of the sphere packing problem — finding the arrangement of spheres that can take up the largest portion of a volume — in eight dimensions.

In a three-dimensional space, the most efficient way to pack spheres is the pyramid arrangement, akin to how oranges are packed on trays in a grocer’s shop (proving this mathematically was extremely hard and was the subject of a tour-de-force paper in the 1990s). But in four or more dimensions, very little is known, says Henry Cohn, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “It’s this horrific gap in our knowledge — almost embarrassing,” said Cohn in an address following the Fields Medal announcement. Viazovska introduced new techniques into the problem that came from number theory and the theory of symmetries in eight dimensions. “Given how poor our understanding is in other dimensions, it’s really miraculous that Maryna was able to get this exactly,” Cohn added. More recently, Cohn worked with Viazovska and others to extend the result to 24-dimensional space.

“Viazovska invents fresh and unexpected tools that allow her to jump over natural barriers that have held us back for years,” says Peter Sarnak, a number theorist at Princeton University in New Jersey...

... The Fields Medals and other IMU prizes are normally announced at the opening of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), which takes place every four years. This year’s congress was scheduled to begin on 6 July in St. Petersburg, Russia, but the plan was scrapped following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Instead, the awards ceremony was moved to Helsinki and the congress will take place as a virtual event.

“We condemn the madness, the injustice, and the irreversibility of war that threatens the very existence of humanity,” wrote four members of what had been the local organizing committee statement on 27 February.

The committee that chooses the Fields winner — whose members’ identities were kept secret until today — reportedly made its decision before the invasion...

Another winner of the Fields medal, June Huh, is also an interesting person. Now a Professor of Mathematics at Princeton, he was a high school drop out in Korea and was rejected at many Universities when he applied to Ph.D. programs because of his poor undergraduate grades, including many failed courses.

[xocetaceans]

1. Thanks for the post. That is very interesting stuff. Here is the set of Quanta Magazine profiles....

The following excerpts are from here:

2022 Fields and Abacus Medals

https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/2022-fields-and-abacus-medals/

In Times of Scarcity, War and Peace, a Ukrainian Finds the Magic in Math
With her homeland mired in war, the sphere-packing number theorist Maryna Viazovska has become the second woman to win a Fields Medal in the award’s 86-year history.

Thomas Lin
Editor in Chief

Erica Klarreich
Contributing Correspondent

July 5, 2022

In late February, just weeks after Maryna Viazovska learned she had won a Fields Medal — the highest honor for a mathematician — Russian tanks and war planes began their assault on Ukraine, her homeland, and Kyiv, her hometown.

Viazovska no longer lived in Ukraine, but her family was still there. Her two sisters, a 9-year-old niece and an 8-year-old nephew set out for Switzerland, where Viazovska now lives. They first had to wait two days for the traffic to let up; even then the drive west was painfully slow. After spending several days in a stranger’s home, waiting their turn as war refugees, the four walked across the border one night into Slovakia, went on to Budapest with help from the Red Cross, then boarded a flight to Geneva. On March 4, they arrived in Lausanne, where they stayed with Viazovska, her husband, her 13-year-old son and her 2-year-old daughter.

Viazovska’s parents, grandmother and other family members remained in Kyiv. As Russian tanks drew ever closer to her parents’ home, Viazovska tried every day to convince them to leave. But her 85-year-old grandmother, who had experienced war and occupation as a child during World War II, refused, and her parents would not leave her behind. Her grandmother “could not imagine she will not die in Ukraine,” Viazovska said, “because she spent all her life there.”

In March, a Russian airstrike leveled the Antonov airplane factory where her father had worked in the waning years of the Soviet era; Viazovska had attended kindergarten nearby. Fortunately for Viazovska’s family and other Kyiv residents, Russia shifted the focus of its war effort to the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine later that month. But the war is not over. Viazovska’s sisters spoke of friends who have had to fight, including some who have died.

...

https://www.quantamagazine.org/ukrainian-mathematician-maryna-viazovska-wins-fields-medal-20220705/

He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal.
June Huh wasn’t interested in mathematics until a chance encounter during his sixth year of college. Now his profound insights connecting combinatorics and geometry have led to math’s highest honor.

Jordana Cepelewicz
Senior Writer

July 5, 2022

June Huh often finds himself lost. Every afternoon, he takes a long walk around Princeton University, where he’s a professor in the mathematics department. On this particular day in mid-May, he’s making his way through the woods around the nearby Institute for Advanced Study — “Just so you know,” he says as he considers a fork in the path ahead, “I don’t know where we are” — pausing every so often to point out the subtle movements of wildlife hiding beneath leaves or behind trees. Among the animals he spots over the next two hours of wandering are a pair of frogs, a red-crested bird, a turtle the size of a thimble, and a quick-footed fox, each given its own quiet moment of observation.

“I’m very good at finding stuff,” he says. “That’s one of my special abilities.”

Huh, 39, has now been awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, for his ability to wander through mathematical landscapes and find just the right objects — objects that he then uses to get the seemingly disparate fields of geometry and combinatorics to talk to each other in new and exciting ways. Starting in graduate school, he has solved several major problems in combinatorics, forging a circuitous route by way of other branches of math to get to the heart of each proof. Every time, finding that path is akin to a “little miracle,” Huh said.

One might say the same of his path into mathematics itself: that it was characterized by much wandering and a series of small miracles. When he was younger, Huh had no desire to be a mathematician. He was indifferent to the subject, and he dropped out of high school to become a poet. It would take a chance encounter during his university years — and many moments of feeling lost — for him to find that mathematics held what he’d been looking for all along.

...

https://www.quantamagazine.org/june-huh-high-school-dropout-wins-the-fields-medal-20220705/