Ukrainian Mathematician Maryna Viazovska Won Fields Medal

The Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska won the highest honor for a mathematician Fields Medal. She is just the second woman to receive this honor in the medal’s 86-year history!

• At the ceremony today, the IMU cited Viazovska’s many mathematical accomplishments, in particular her proof that an arrangement called the E8 lattice is the densest packing of spheres in eight dimensions.
• Viazovska is accepting her Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki, Finland. This conference, organized by the International Mathematical Union every four years in concert with the Fields Medal announcements, had been set to take place in St. Petersburg, Russia, despite concerns over the host country’s human rights record, which prompted a boycott petition signed by over 400 mathematicians. But when Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the IMU pivoted to a virtual ICM and moved the in-person award ceremony to Finland.
• Today Maryna is working in École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, known in English as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne — a leading research university in math, physics and engineering — it’s sometimes referred to as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of Europe.

Read more about the story of brave Ukrainian scientist via Quantum Magazine