Ukrainian is the second woman to receive the Fields Medal – 05/07/2022 – Science

Four mathematicians received on Tuesday (the fifth) in Helsinki, FinlandFields Medal, including Ukrainian Marina Vyazovska, the second woman to receive the prestigious award since its inception in 1936.

The other three winners of the prize, equivalent to the “Nobel Prize in Mathematics”, are French Hugo Dominelle Cobain, Britain’s James Maynard and South Korean American John Huh.

The gold medal, awarded every four years and accompanied by a check for C$15,000 (just over $11,500), rewards “outstanding achievement” for mathematicians under the age of 40.

The announcement was made at a ceremony in Helsinki, Finland, during the International Congress of Mathematicians.

The concert was initially scheduled to take place in St. Petersburg, but was moved to Helsinki due to Invasion of Ukraine.

“The brutal war that Russia continues to wage against Ukraine has left no alternative,” said the President of the International Sports Federation (IMU), Carlos Kenig.

“My life changed forever”

Marina Vyazovska is the second woman to receive the medal in 80 years.

She was born in 1984 in Ukraine, when the country was still part of the Soviet Union, a teacher at the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerlandsince 2017.

With the invasion of Ukraine in February, Vyasovska said, “my life changed forever.”

The Ukrainian won the prize for solving a version of a century-old geometric problem that showed the densest packing of identical spheres in eight dimensions.

The history of the “ball packing problem” dates back to the 16th century, when the question arose of how to stack cannonballs to get the largest possible solution. The jury made the decision before the war began.

Maryam Mirzakhani was the first woman to receive the Fields Medal in 2014, an Iranian mathematician who died three years after a battle with cancer.

The work of 36-year-old Frenchman Dominelle Cobain focuses on the mathematical field of statistical physics. He is a professor at the Graduate School of Sciences in the Paris region and the University of Geneva.

He was awarded a prize for solving “old problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions”, which, according to the jury, opened several new directions of research.

James Maynard, 35, is a professor at Oxford University at United kingdom. He was awarded the medal for his “contributions to analytic number theory, which have allowed important advances to be made in understanding the structure of primes and the Diophantine approximation”.

Jun Huh, 39, professor at Princeton University, United StateAwarded for “transforming” the field of geometric synthesis “using methods from Hodge theory, equatorial geometry and singularity theory,” the jury said.

Tropical Engineering is named in honor of the discipline’s pioneer, a Brazilian computer scientist Emery Simonwho died in 2009.