High award for Maryna Viazovska Bonn mathematics graduate receives prestigious Fields Medal
Bonn · Maryna Viazovska has received the Fields Medal in Helsinki. Nine years ago, the Ukrainian-born scientist completed her doctorate at the University of Bonn.
She is only the second woman ever to receive this high distinction, and it has a Bonn connection: mathematician Maryna Viazovska was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Mathematics Congress in Helsinki. The 37-year-old Viazovska comes from Ukraine and completed her doctorate at the University of Bonn in 2013. Today she is a professor at EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) in Switzerland. The award has been presented every four years since 1936 to mathematicians under the age of 40. Its prestige is comparable to that of the Nobel Prizes.
According to EPFL, the young professor specialising in number theory received the Fields Medal for her solution to the problem of sphere packing in dimensions 8 and 24. The question of how to pack spheres as close together as possible, for example in an orange pyramid, has occupied mathematics for more than four centuries. As early as 1611, Johannes Kepler suspected that this could best be achieved in the form of a pyramid. His hypothesis was not proven until 1998.
Viazovska decided to solve the problem for dimensions 8 and 24 because they are special dimensions and the solutions for them are particularly elegant. "The difficulty is that although the problem remains the same, each dimension is different and the optimal solution depends strongly on the dimension," the mathematician said. Experts praised the originality and elegance of her proof, in which she used "modular forms", which were a main topic of her dissertation.
As a doctoral student with Don Zagier at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Viazovska belonged to the Bonn International Graduate School of Mathematics (Bigs Mathematics). Bigs Mathematics is the graduate school of the Cluster of Excellence Hausdorff-Center for Mathematics at the University of Bonn, where excellent students from Germany and all over the world are introduced to top mathematical research.
Bonn University Rector Professor Michael Hoch congratulated Maryna Viazovska on her honour: "It is a great pleasure that an alumna of the University of Bonn has received the Fields Medal. That Ms Viazovska is only the second woman to receive this honour is remarkable!" This is the third time that the Fields Medal has been awarded to doctoral candidates from Bonn - following Maxim Kontsevich, who also completed his doctorate with Don Zagier in Bonn in 1992 and received the medal in 1998, and Peter Scholze, who received the award in 2018. Scholze has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of Bonn since 2012 and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn since 2018.
Maryna Viazovska was born on 2 December 1984 in Kiev, Ukraine. After completing her Bachelor's degree in Kiev, she completed a Master's degree at the TU Kaiserslautern and then moved to the University of Bonn for her doctorate, which she completed in 2013. After a postdoctoral position in Berlin, she came to EPFL in 2016, where she received a full professorship from a tenure-track assistant professorship in 2017.
(Original text: Margit Warken-Dieke; Translation: Mareike Graepel)
