Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska is one of four winners of the 2022 Fields Awards, one of the highest mathematical medals awarded to people under the age of 40. ; June Huh, combintorics specialist at Princeton University in New Jersey; and Hugo Duminil-Copin, who is studying mathematics at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) near Paris. The International Mathematics Union (IMU) announced the winners at an awards ceremony in Helsinki on July 5th.“All medalists are incredibly qualified and capable, reflecting the movement of mathematical research around the world,” said BrynaKra, a mathematician at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, president-elect of the American Mathematical Society.
Viazovska, based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), is the second woman to receive the award. He is best known for his solution to the problem of circular packing – to get a spatial arrangement that can take up a large portion of the volume – in eight scales.In a three-dimensional space, the most effective way to pack spheres is pyramid schemes, similar to the way oranges are packaged in groceries store (proving that this was mathematically very difficult and was the subject of a tour-de-force paper in the 1990s). But at four or more levels, very little is known, says Henry Cohn, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “This is a terrible gap in our knowledge – almost embarrassing,” said Cohn at the address following the Fields Medal announcement. Viazovska introduces new techniques to the problem from numerical theory and symmetry theory in eight dimensions. “Because of our poor judgment in some cases, it is truly a miracle that Maryna was able to achieve this,” added Cohn. More recently, Cohn has worked with Viazovska and others to expand the effect into a 24-dimensional space.
“Viazovska is developing new and unexpected tools that allow him to jump over the natural barriers that have held him back for years,” said Peter Sarnak, a mathematician at Princeton University in New Jersey. of key numbers, Sarnak says “many of his results were seen as a pure dream before he announced them”. Maynard’s quote from the Fields Medal committee states that he “has made remarkable contributions to the theory of numerical analysis”. Duminil-Copin has achieved a number of basic results in a mathematical model that “explains how a piece of metal loses its magnetism when it reaches a certain temperature”, says his former adviser Wendelin Werner, a mathematician at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.
The June Huh quote said he and his colleagues had “transformed the field of geometric combinatorics”. He did this by downloading tools from another mathematical field, algebraic geometry. Fields Medals and other IMU awards are usually announced at the opening of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), which takes place every four years. This year’s conference was scheduled to begin on July 6 in St. Petersburg. Petersburg, Russia, but the plan was scrapped following a Russian invasion of Ukraine in February. Instead, the award ceremony was moved to Helsinki and the conference will be like a real event statement by the area planning committee on 27 February.
The Fields winner selection committee – the identity of its members kept secret to this day – reportedly made a decision before the attack. At the ICM satellite conference on July 2, another Ukrainian-born woman, Svetlana Jitomirskaya at the University of California in Irvine, she won the First Ladyzhenskaya Award in Mathematical Physics – the first major female-disciplinary award open to people of any gender. The award celebrates the late Russian mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya, who narrowly missed out on her own Fields Medal in 1958. Prior to Viazovska, the only woman to win the Fields Medal was the late Maryam Mirzakhani, in 2014.
Source Journal Reference: Davide Castelvecchi, Ukrainian mathematician becomes second woman to win prestigious Fields Medal, Nature News (2022), https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00470-3
