Topline
Ukrainian Maryna Viazovska was named on Tuesday as one of four recipients of the Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious accolades in mathematics, becoming just the second woman to be honored since the award was first given in 1936.
A Fields Medal is one of math’s top awards.
Key Facts
The Fields Medal, often compared to the Nobel Prize, is administered by the International Mathematics Union (IMU) to four researchers under the age of 40 every four years and is considered one of the most esteemed prizes for mathematics.
Viazovska, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and a Kyiv native, is best known for her work on how to densely pack spheres in eight dimensions.
Princeton’s June Huh, who dropped out of high school to write poetry and did not turn to math until he was in his last year of college, was honored for his contributions to geometry and combinatorics, a branch of mathematics concerning how things can be arranged.
James Maynard, of the University of Oxford, and Hugo Duminil-Copin, jointly appointed at the University of Geneva and the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies in France, were also recognized for their work elucidating how prime numbers are spaced and understanding phase transitions, respectively.
The IMU awarded Mark Braverman, also of Princeton, the Abacus Medal—a similarly distinguished prize for computer science modeled on the Fields—who is best known for his work on the amount it costs to perform a computational task.
Key Background
The Fields Medal, conceived by Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields, is peculiar among academic prizes in that it recognizes the accomplishments of people early on in their careers. Alongside the Abel Prize, it is one of the top accolades a mathematician can collect. Like other top academic awards, winning can accelerate a researcher’s career, open new doors and help secure future funding and collaborations. These benefits are not distributed evenly, however, with white men are disproportionately represented and there is poor representation for women or marginalized groups.
Big Number
2. That’s how many women have received a Fields Medal since 1936. Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian professor at Stanford, became the first woman to win the prize in 2014 for her work on complex geometry and dynamic systems. Mirzakhani, who was also the first Iranian to win the prize, died from breast cancer at the age of 40 just three years later.
Surprising Fact
Though the IMU’s computer science prize has been awarded since 1981, Braverman is the first recipient of the Abacus Medal. Previously it had been awarded as the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize to honor the Finnish mathematician. The IMU renamed the award after historians noted that Nevanlinna was a Nazi sympathizer and collaborator during World War 2.
Further Reading
Diversity in science prizes: why is progress so slow? (Nature)
