Amid the Ukraine war, which is now in its 133rd Day, the war-torn country had a reason to smile after Ukrainian mathematician, Maryna Viazovska, won the prestigious Fields Medals on Tuesday.
The 37-year-old along with France’s Hugo Duminil-Copin, United States-based June Huh and Britain’s James Maynard were awarded the medals at a ceremony in Helsinki.
Viazovska becomes only the second woman to win the prize in its over 80-year history. The first woman to win the prize was Maryam Mirzakhani in 2014, an Iranian-born mathematician who died three years later in 2017 after a battle with cancer.
From history of the Fields Medal to its significance in today’s world, here's all we know about the honour.
Fields Medal
The Fields Medal is awarded by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), an international non-governmental and non-profit scientific organisation that aims to promote international cooperation in mathematics.
Often referred to as the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize, it is granted only every four years and is given, by tradition, to mathematicians under the age of 40, rather than to more senior scholars.
The medal originated at the 1924 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Toronto, where a resolution was adopted that at each ICM, two gold medals should be awarded to recognise outstanding mathematical achievement.
Professor John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician and Secretary of the 1924 Congress, donated the funds, establishing the Fields Medal — contrary to his explicit request.
In 1966, it was agreed that, in light of the great expansion of mathematical research, up to four medals could be awarded at each Congress, the IMU says.
Interestingly, confidential correspondence from the 1950s reveals the award was never intended to honour the most important discoveries in the field, but was meant to recognise promising up-and-coming talents.
Money and medals
Winners of this award are announced at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM).
This year the event was to be held in Russia, but was moved to Helsinki after hundreds of mathematicians signed an open letter protesting St Petersburg as the choice of the host city, and after Russia began its invasion.
Besides the honour, winners receive a 14-carat gold medal weighing 169 g, with a unit price of approximately 5,500 Canadian dollars. In addition to this, they also receive a cash award of CAD 15,000.
The obverse of the medal shows the face of famous mathematician Archimedes with the Latin words “Transire suum pectus mundoque potiri”, translated as “To pass beyond your understanding and make yourself master of the universe”.
The reverse has the inscription “Congregati ex toto orbe mathematici ob scripta insignia tribuere”, or “The mathematicians having congregated from the whole world awarded (this medal) because of outstanding writings”.
Indian winners?
Started in 1936, a total of 64 Fields Medals have been conferred. Of this, two have been awarded to Indian-origin mathematicians — Akshay Venkatesh of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Manjul Bhargava of the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University.
Venkatesh won the honour in 2018 for “for his synthesis of analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory, which has resolved long-standing problems in areas such as the equidistribution of arithmetic objects”.
Meanwhile, Bhargava was honoured for “developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves”.
This year’s winners
Maryna Viazovska, a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland since 2017, has been awarded the Fields Medal for solving a version of a centuries-old mathematical problem, where she proved the densest packing of identical spheres in eight dimensions.
The “sphere packing problem” dates back to the 16th century, when the question of how cannonballs should be stacked to achieve the densest possible solution was poised.
France’s Hugo Duminil-Copin, who also won the honour, had solved “long-standing problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions”, which has opened up several new research directions.
James Maynard, a professor at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, received the medal “for contributions to analytic number theory, which have led to major advances in the understanding in the structure of prime numbers and in Diophantine approximation”.
June Huh, 39, a professor at Princeton University in the United States, was given the award for “transforming” the field of geometric combinatorics, “using methods of Hodge theory, tropical geometry, and singularity theory”, the jury said.
With inputs from agencies
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