Four mathematicians were awarded prestigious Fields Medals this year, the International Mathematical Union (IMU) jury said.

Ukrainian Maryna Viazovska, France’s Hugo Duminil-Copin, US-based June Huh and Britain’s James Maynard were awarded the medals at a ceremony in Helsinki.

The ceremony was part of the International Congress of Mathematicians, which was initially scheduled to be held in Saint Petersburg but was moved online due to the war in Ukraine. The award ceremony took place in Finland.

Fields Medal

• The Fields Medal, sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize in mathematics, recognises outstanding mathematical achievement by under-40s and is awarded once every four years.

• At the 1932 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Zurich, a resolution was adopted that at each ICM, two gold medals should be awarded to recognise outstanding mathematical achievement. 

• Professor J.C. Fields, a Canadian mathematician who was secretary of the 1924 Congress, later donated funds establishing the medals, which were named in his honour. 

• The first Fields Medals were awarded at the ICM in 1936 in Oslo, Norway. In 1966 it was agreed that, in light of the great expansion of mathematical research, up to four medals could be awarded at each ICM.

• The Fields Medal is awarded every four years on the occasion of the International Congress of Mathematicians to recognise outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement.

• The award consists of a gold medal bearing the profile of Archimedes and a cash amount of $15,000 Canadian dollars.

The four awardees

Maryna Viazovska: 

Viazovska is 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.

Viazovska was born in 1984 in Ukraine, then still part of the Soviet Union, and has been a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland since 2017. She was awarded the prize 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.

Hugo Duminil-Copin:

Duminil-Copin, born in France in 1985, is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, focusing on the mathematical branch of statistical physics. Duminil-Copin was honoured for solving long-standing problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions, which according to the jury has opened up several new research directions.

James Maynard:

Maynard, 35, is a professor at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and 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:

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.

International Mathematical Union

• The International Mathematical Union is a non-governmental and non-profit scientific organisation devoted to promoting the development of mathematics in all its aspects across the world. 

• IMU is a member of the International Science Council (ISC).

• It was first established in 1920. However, it was dissolved in 1932.

• IMU was re-established in 1950.

• The IMU Secretariat is situated in Berlin.

Other honours by the IMU

Abacus Medal: It honours distinguished achievements in mathematical aspects of information science. It is awarded for the first time in 2022. It replaces the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize which was awarded from 1982 to 2018.

Mark Braverman, Professor of Computer Science at Princeton, was awarded the Abacus Medal.

Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize: It is awarded for outstanding mathematical contributions that have found significant applications outside of mathematics. It was first awarded in 2006.

This year’s Gauss Prize was awarded to Elliott Lieb, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, Emeritus, and Professor of Mathematical Physics, Emeritus at Princeton.

Chern Medal Award: It is awarded to an individual whose accomplishments warrant the highest level of recognition for outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics. It was awarded for the first time in 2010.

Barry Mazur, the Gerhard Gabe University Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, was named the winner of the 2022 Chern Medal Award 

Leelavati Prize: It recognises outstanding public outreach work for mathematics. The IMU has awarded the Prize since 2010. Since 2014 this Prize has been sponsored by Infosys.

Nikolai Andreev of the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow was named the winner of the Leelavati Prize.

ICM Emmy Noether Lecture: It honours women who have made fundamental and sustained contributions to the mathematical sciences, it was presented for the first time in 1994. 

The 2022 ICM Emmy Noether Lecture was delivered by Marie-France Vignéras, Professor Emeritus of the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu, Paris, France.

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