Ukrainian mathematician is the 2nd woman to win Fields Prize.
Maryna Viazovska. Crédito: Matteo Fieni
Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska, a professor at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (Switzerland), is the second woman to win the Fields Medal since 1936. Until then, Iranian Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017) was the only woman to have been awarded the medal, in 2014, the same year as IMPA researcher Artur Avila. The winners of the prize, equivalent to the Nobel Prize in mathematics, were announced on Tuesday morning (5), at a ceremony in Helsinki (Finland), during the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM).
The other three recipients of the honor are Frenchman Hugo Duminil-Copin, who has a close relationship with IMPA, Briton James Maynard, and American-South Korean June Huh. The Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics, is awarded every four years to up to four outstanding mathematicians who are 40 years old or younger. In addition to the medal, the winners receive a check for 15,000 Canadian dollars (just over US$11,500).
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Born in Kyiv in 1984 when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, Maryna was recognized for solving the century-old problem of optimal sphere packing in dimension 8, and, in collaboration with other colleagues, in dimension 24. "The approach developed by the Ukrainian scientist is noteworthy for being radically different from the solution to the dimension 3 case, known as Kepler's conjecture," highlights IMPA's extraordinary researcher Artur Avila , the only Latin American to win the Fields Medal and a member of the jury committee for this edition of the award.
Professor Hugo Duminil-Copin, from the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris and the University of Geneva, works in the mathematical area of statistical physics and was recognized for solving "long-standing problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions." According to the jury, Duminil-Copin's discoveries have opened up several new directions for research.
Hugo Duminil-Copin. Foto: Matteo Fieni
The Frenchman cultivates a close relationship with IMPA and with Brazil. In addition to being a co-author with professors from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), he supervised the doctoral thesis of Franco Severo, a former IMPA master's student and medalist in the Brazilian Mathematics Olympiad for Public Schools (OBMEP). He was at the institute in 2017 for the XXI Brazilian School of Probability and is a confirmed speaker at the conference marking IMPA's 70th anniversary in October of this year.
Born in California and raised in South Korea, June Huh has an unusual relationship with mathematics. Contrary to what one might expect from someone recognized with the highest award in the field, he wasn't a big enthusiast of the subject in school. He only approached mathematical research at age 23, in his final year of undergraduate studies in Physics and Astronomy at Seoul National University.
Professor June Huh of Princeton University (United States) received the Fields Prize for transforming the field of geometric combinatorics, "using methods from Hodge theory, tropical geometry, and singularity theory," the jury stated.
June Huh. Foto: Lance Murphey
An expert in one of the most intriguing areas of mathematics, number theory, James Maynard was recognized for his "contributions to the analytic theory of numbers, which allowed important advances in understanding the structure of prime numbers and in the Diophantine approximation."
A professor at Oxford University (United Kingdom), the Briton stated in an interview with The Guardian that "prime numbers are like atoms for mathematicians." "In the same way that you can understand a lot about chemicals by knowing the atoms that compose them, you can understand the enormous amount about integers and how they interact with multiplication – which ends up being very important for things like cryptography – if you understand things about prime numbers," he added.
James Maynard. Foto: Ryan Cowan
To learn more about the 2022 Fields Prize laureates, visit the International Mathematical Union (IMU) website.
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