Who Is Maryna Viazovska? Ukrainian Mathematician Becomes Second Woman To Win Fields Medal

Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska was awarded the Fields Medal, often described as the Nobel Prize in mathematics. The Fields Medal is awarded every four years to mathematicians under the age of 40 years.

Maryna Viazovska was awarded as one of the four recipients of the Fields Medal on June 5. Viazovska is currently a professor at the Chair of Number Theory at the Institute of Mathematics of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

The International Mathematical Union said that Viazovska was honoured for solving a version of a centuries-old mathematical problem. The three other recipients honoured with the Fields Medal are French mathematician Hugo Deminil-Copin of the University of Geneva, British mathematician James Maynard of the University of Oxford, and Korean-American mathematician June Huh of Princeton.

The Fields Medal is awarded every four years and recipients are usually announced at the International Congress of Mathematicians, which was set to be held in Russia but was moved to Helsinki, Finland. The first Fields Medal was awarded in 1936 and has been awarded every four years since 1950.

Who Is Maryna Viazovska?

• The Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska won the Fields Medal, which recognises “outstanding mathematical achievement” for her work.
• Viazovska is the second woman to win the Fields Medal in its 86-year-old history. The first woman to win the Fields Medal was Maryam Mirzakhani in 2014.
• Viazovska was born in 1984 in Kyiv, Ukraine, which was still a part of the Soviet Union at that time. She has been a professor at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland since 2017.
• She was awarded for solving a version centuries-old mathematical problem, the “sphere packing problem”. The problem was about how many cannonballs should be stacked to achieve the densest possible solution. The sphere packing problem dates back to the 16th century.
• When Viazovska was a student at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, she competed in the International Mathematics Competition for University Students for four years. She was one of the first-place winners in 2002 and 2005.
• She received her master’s from the University of Kaiserslautern and a doctorate from the University of Bonn in 2013.

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