27/12/2022

2022 Retrospective: Ukrainian woman is the second woman to win the Fields Prize.

Maryna Viazovska. Crédito: Matteo Fieni

While IMPA promotes initiatives to increase female participation in the scientific field, news in July caused a sensation on the international stage: a woman was awarded the Fields Medal – the highest honor in mathematics.

Ukrainian Maryna Viazovska, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), was the second woman to win the medal since 1936. Until then, Iranian Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017) was the only female researcher to have received the honor, in 2014 – the same year that IMPA researcher Artur Avila was also awarded it. Check out the video about Maryna's career by clicking here.

The prize, equivalent to the Nobel Prize, is awarded every four years to mathematicians under 40 who have made significant contributions to the discipline. This year, the award ceremony took place in Helsinki, Finland, during the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM).

Viazovska's main work addresses a problem of ball packing, raised more than 400 years ago by a practical question for the British navy, on its way to world hegemony: how to store cannonballs so that the largest possible number would fit in the hold of each ship?

“The approach developed by the Ukrainian scientist is noteworthy for being radically different from the solution to the case of dimension 3, known as Kepler's conjecture,” commented Artur Avila , who was part of the jury committee for this edition of the prize.

Other winners

Hugo Duminil-Copin. Foto: Matteo Fieni

Three other mathematicians were also awarded the Fields Medal this year: Hugo Duminil-Copin , professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris and the University of Geneva; June Huh, professor at Princeton University (United States); and James Maynard, professor at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom).

Duminil-Copin was recognized for solving “long-standing problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions.” According to the jury, Duminil-Copin's discoveries opened several new directions for research. The Frenchman cultivates a close relationship with IMPA and with Brazil. The researcher was at the institute in 2017 for the XXI Brazilian School of Probability, and also at the IMPA 70 Years Conference , which took place in October of this year.

June Huh. Foto: Lance Murphey

Researcher June Huh received the Fields Prize for transforming the field of geometric combinatorics, "using methods from Hodge theory, tropical geometry, and singularity theory," the jury stated, and James Maynard was recognized for his "contributions to analytic number theory, which have enabled important advances in understanding the structure of prime numbers and in the Diophantine approximation."

James Maynard. Foto: Ryan Cowan