On Tuesday, four mathematicians received the Fields Medal, known as the “Nobel Prize in Mathematics”, in Helsinki, including Ukraine’s Marina Vyazovskaya, the second woman to receive the prestigious award since its inception in 1936.
Other recipients of this four-year medal are Frenchman Hugo Dominel Cobain, South Korean scientist from the US John Hu and Briton James Maynard.
This medal is awarded by the International Mathematical Union and comes with a financial award of CAD 15,000 (US$11,500). It celebrates the “exceptional discoveries” of mathematicians under the age of 40.
The winners were announced at a ceremony held in the Finnish capital as part of the International Conference of Mathematicians. The event was planned to be held in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, but the organizers of the ceremony moved it to Helsinki due to the war in Ukraine.
“The barbaric war that Russia continues to wage against Ukraine has left no other choice,” said Carlos Kenning, president of the International Mathematical Union, at the opening of the event.
Pride of France
Hugo Dominel Koppen, a statistician, became the thirteenth Frenchman to receive the Fields Medal. The last of these Frenchmen was Cédric Vianne, who received the award in 2010.
“Congratulations! This award testifies to the vitality and excellence of our French school of mathematics,” French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted. “I am very proud. Hugo Dominel Koppen is a bit of an unusual figure, given his excellent biography, as well as the dynamism of teamwork,” he demonstrated to the scientific community.
Frenchman Hugo Dominel Coban, 36, is a statistical physicist. This probabilistic mathematician and university professor has divided his time since the age of twenty-nine between the Institute for Higher Scientific Research near Paris and the Swiss University in Geneva. “Statistical physics is the study of the properties of complex systems. I’m trying to understand how certain phase transitions happen, like with magnets,” said Dominel Cobain, who attended the awards ceremony along with three other winners. He received the award after solving “chronic problems associated with the probabilistic theory of phase transitions”, which opened up “new lines of research”, according to the awards committee. These trends include applications as diverse as city traffic management, weather forecasting, the spread of infectious diseases, and magnetic resonance imaging.
“My life has changed forever”
As for Marina Vyazovskaya, the second woman to win the prize since its inception eight decades ago, she was born 37 years ago in Ukraine during the Soviet Union. Since 2017, she has been a professor at the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland.
She said that at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, “my life changed forever.”
And the mathematician received a pre-war award for solving a centuries-old geometric problem, proving the densest stacking of identical spheres outside of three-dimensional space, in this case the eighth dimension, where symmetry is optimal.
The “compact stacking problem,” better known as the “orange merchant’s problem,” has plagued mathematicians since the 16th century, when the question of stacking as many cannonballs as possible arose. “Mathematicians have struggled with this problem for decades, even the greatest have given up,” Renaud Colangon, a lecturer at France’s University of Bordeaux, told AFP. According to the mathematician, Marina Vyazovskaya achieved a “big breakthrough” by finding a “magic proof” of optimal stacking in this dimension.
Stacks of large balls are useful, for example, for error-correcting codes for interference in communication signals. In 2014, Iranian Maryam Mirzakhani, who died of cancer three years later, became the first woman to receive the Fields Medal. James Maynard, a 35-year-old British professor at Oxford University in the UK, was also awarded the medal “for contributions to analytic number theory that have led to significant progress in understanding the structure of numbers,” according to the Fields Medal Committee. This Oxford University professor studies prime numbers, which are still poorly understood and are only divisible by integers other than 1 and themselves. The British winner summed up his work by saying: “I look for order in complex things.” For his part, 39-year-old Princeton professor John Hugh was selected to receive the award in recognition of his “transformation” in the field of harmonic geometry “using the methods of Hodge theory, equatorial geometry and singularity theory.” “I grew up in Korea and dreamed of becoming a poet. With math, I wander into my geometric fantasy world,” Jun Hu said.
