A splendid achievement has been delivered to the people of Ukraine who are exhausted from the war with Russia. Ukrainian mathematician Marina Viazovska (38) was selected as the recipient of this year’s ‘Fields Medal’ on the 5th (local time). The Fields Medal is world-renowned enough to be called the Nobel Prize in mathematics.
According to the New York Times (NYT) and online science media ‘Phys.org’, Dr. Marina Viazovska, a Ukrainian who is currently a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, was named the second female recipient since the Fields Medal was established in 1936. . She was nominated for a Fields Medal as she was Dr. Biazovska and she was known for solving Kepler conjectures at a higher level in the meantime.
Before this year, 59 of the 60 mathematicians who had won the Fields Medal were men. In 2014, Stanford University mathematician and Iranian Mariam Mirzakhani was the only woman to ever receive the Fields Medal.
“It’s sad that I’m only the second woman (prime minister),” said Dr. Biazovska in an interview with the New York Times. “But why? I do not know. I hope she will be different in the future,” she said.
Dr. Biazovska’s family originally lived in Kiiu, the Ukrainian capital. Biazovska was born in Kiiu in 1984 when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.
After studying at the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kiiu, he obtained a master’s degree from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern in Germany and a doctorate from the University of Bonn.
Dr. Biazovska has been the head of the department at the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland since 2018. Her husband, Daniel Evtucinsky, is a physicist at the Swiss Institute.
But Dr. Biazovska said life changed forever when Russia invaded Ukraine. It is said that the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused damage to his family.
Her parents and sister were living in Kiiu, the Ukrainian capital, when the war began in February of this year. When the war broke out, his sisters and young nephews were evacuated from Kiiu, where he now resides in Switzerland with Dr. Biazowska. “My parents still live near Kiiwu,” said Dr. Biazovska.
“I couldn’t think of anything else, including math,” said Dr. Biazovska at the awards ceremony, which was moved from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, Finland’s capital, following the Russian war.
“(Math) helped me to forget the fear and pain inside me,” he said, teaching mathematics to students when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.
At the awards ceremony, he paid tribute to the 21-year-old mathematician Yulia Zhdanovska, who was killed in March this year in a Russian missile attack on Kharkiv, Ukraine.
“Yulia was a person full of light and her big dream was to teach math to Ukrainian children,” said Dr. Biazovska. “When young people die, ‘If young and talented people are wasted in this terrible war, I “What does it mean to you?” he said.
Dr. Wiazovska’s work is a modification of Johannes Kepler’s conjecture more than 400 years ago. Kepler is best known for realizing that planets revolve around the sun in elliptical orbits, but Kepler also considered cannonball stacking. He argued that the usual pyramid stacking is the most dense way they can be arranged, filling 75% of the available space.
But Kepler could not prove that claim. It was something no one else could have done until 1998, when Thomas Hales, then a student at the University of Michigan, succeeded with the help of 250 pages of evidence and a controversial computer program.
Dr. Wiazovska was awarded the Fields Medal for his work on sphere packing that has plagued mathematicians for hundreds of years.
It basically involves putting the spheres into the container in the most compact way. Dr. Biazovska said the first question was how many cannonballs could be loaded into the ship. Hundreds of years later, mathematicians solved the problem in three dimensions, which involved stacking oranges in pyramids in supermarkets.
However, it has proven difficult to extend the scope of the theory to the other possible dimensions in mathematics. Dr. Biazovska persistently studied this problem from 2003 to 2016 and discovered a ‘magic formula’ that solves the problem in 8 dimensions and 24 dimensions.
MIT mathematician Henry Cohn said at the awards ceremony, “Marina has done something miraculous,” Philippe Moustrou of the University of Toulouse, France, told AFP. No, we found additional ingredients.”
But Biazovska’s thoughts remain with the war the hopeful return of the peace she once took for granted.
“What I love most about Kiiu is its green parks, quiet places, and ancient churches,” said Dr. Biazovska. “Now I know there are signs of war there and I am afraid of this.” “But Kiiu is one of the eternal cities. I want to come back soon,” said Dr. Viazovska.
There are a total of four Fields Medal winners this year. Awarded to up to four mathematicians based on their achievements. There is no joint award, and the prize money is 15,000 Canadian dollars (about 15 million won).
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