Hugo Duminil-Copin
The other two winners of this award, given every four years and considered as the equivalent of a “Nobel Prize in Mathematics”, are the researcher based in the United States, June Huh, and the British James Maynard.
The medal, awarded by the International Mathematical Union, celebrates “outstanding discoveries” by researchers under 40 years of age.
The declaration was made during a ceremony in Helsinki at the International Congress of Mathematicians. This one should have initially taken place in Saint Petersburg but the ceremony was relocated to Helsinki because of the war in Ukraine.
The Frenchman Hugo Duminil-Copin, 36 years old, dedicates his work to the mathematical branch of statistical physics. Appointed professor at the age of 29, the probabilistic mathematician divides his time between the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, near Paris, and the University of Geneva.
The Frenchman was awarded for solving several “long-standing problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions,” which has opened up “several new research directions,” according to the jury.
The second woman to win the prize in its 80-year history, Maryna Viazovska was born 37 years ago in Ukraine. She has been a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, since 2017.
The mathematician received the award for solving a version of a centuries-old geometric problem, demonstrating the densest stacking of identical spheres beyond three-dimensional space – in this case the amazing dimension 8 where symmetry is optimal.
The “compact stacking problem,” more commonly known as the “orange merchant problem,” has been plaguing mathematicians since the 16th century, when the question of the densest possible stacking of cannonballs arose.
In 2014, Iranian Maryam Mirzakhani, who died of cancer three years later, was the first woman to win the Fields Medal.
The 35-year-old Briton James Maynard is a professor at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He receives the medal “for (his) contributions to analytic number theory, which have led to major advances in the understanding of the structure of prime numbers and in diophantine approximation.
Professor at Princeton University in the United States, June Huh, 39, was selected for having “transformed” the field of combinatorial geometry, “using methods from Hodge theory, tropical geometry and singularity theory”.
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