Ukraine’s Maryna Viazovska is among the four mathematicians who have been awarded the prestigious Fields Medal, which is often described as the Nobel Prize in mathematics. The other winners of the award given out every four years are French mathematician Hugo Duminil-Copin from the University of Geneva; Korean-American mathematician June Huh from Princeton; and British mathematician James Maynard from the University of Oxford, news agency Associated Press reported.
The Fields Medal is awarded to mathematicians aged under 40.
Quoting the International Mathematical Union, the report said the award recognises Viazovska’s work on the “densest packing of identical spheres in eight dimensions”. She works with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, holding the chair in number theory.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February this year profoundly changed her life, Viazovska was quoted as saying.
“When the war started I could not think about anything else, including mathematics,” she said.
“When I’m in front of class, I have to forget about everything else because I have to be very focused,” Viazovska said, adding that this made her forget about the “fear and pain inside myself”.
The Fields Medal list is usually announced at the International Congress of Mathematicians, which was scheduled to be held in Russia this year but moved to Finland capital Helsinki, instead.
“The ongoing barbaric war that Russia still continues to wage against Ukraine clearly shows that no other alternative was feasible,” International Mathematical Union president Carlos E Kenig was quoted as saying.
According to the AP report, Viazovska recently dedicated one of her lectures to Yulia Zdanovksa, another young Ukrainian mathematician and computer scientist from Kharkiv, who was killed in a Russian missile attack.
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