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The International Mathematical Union jury awarded four mathematicians, including Ukrainian Maryna Viazovska, prestigious Fields medals on Tuesday. Hugo Duminil-Copin of France, June Huh of the United States, and James Maynard of the United Kingdom were also honored at a ceremony in Helsinki.
The Fields medal, also known as the Nobel Prize in mathematics, is awarded every four years and recognises “outstanding mathematical accomplishment” by people under the age of 40.
Viazovska is only the second woman to receive the award in its more than 80-year history.
The ceremony was part of an International Congress of Mathematicians, which was originally scheduled to take place in Saint Petersburg but was rescheduled due to the conflict in Ukraine.
The award ceremony was held in Finland.
Viazovska was born in 1984 in Ukraine, which was still a part of the Soviet Union at the time, and has been a professor at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne since 2017.
She won the prize for proving the highest density packing of identical spheres in eight dimensions, which was a version of a millennia mathematical problem.
The “sphere packing problem” dates back to the 16th century, when scientists debated how to stack cannonballs to achieve the densest possible solution.
Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born mathematician who dropped dead three years later in 2017 after a fight with cancer, was the first woman to win the prize in 2014.
Duminil-Copin, born in 1985 in France, is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques who specialises in the mathematical branch of statistical physics.
The International Mathematical Union’s President, Carlos Kenig, stated that Duminil-Copin was honoured for attempting to solve “long-standing problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions,” which the jury stated has opened up several new research directions.
Maynard, 35, is an university professor of Oxford in the United Kingdom. He was awarded the medal “for contributions to analytic pure mathematics that have led to major advances in understanding of the structure of prime numbers and Diophantine approximation,” according to Kenig.
“His work is highly inventive, frequently leading to unexpected breakthroughs on important problems that seemed inaccessible by current techniques,” the union said in a statement.
The award was given to June Huh, 39, a professor at Princeton University in the United States, for “transforming” the field of geometric combinatorics by “using methods of Hodge theory, tropical geometry, and singularity theory,” according to the jury.
