The following excerpts are from here:
In Times of Scarcity, War and Peace, a Ukrainian Finds the Magic in Math
With her homeland mired in war, the sphere-packing number theorist Maryna Viazovska has become the second woman to win a Fields Medal in the award’s 86-year history.
Thomas Lin
Editor in Chief
Erica Klarreich
Contributing Correspondent
July 5, 2022
In late February, just weeks after Maryna Viazovska learned she had won a Fields Medal — the highest honor for a mathematician — Russian tanks and war planes began their assault on Ukraine, her homeland, and Kyiv, her hometown.
Viazovska no longer lived in Ukraine, but her family was still there. Her two sisters, a 9-year-old niece and an 8-year-old nephew set out for Switzerland, where Viazovska now lives. They first had to wait two days for the traffic to let up; even then the drive west was painfully slow. After spending several days in a stranger’s home, waiting their turn as war refugees, the four walked across the border one night into Slovakia, went on to Budapest with help from the Red Cross, then boarded a flight to Geneva. On March 4, they arrived in Lausanne, where they stayed with Viazovska, her husband, her 13-year-old son and her 2-year-old daughter.
Viazovska’s parents, grandmother and other family members remained in Kyiv. As Russian tanks drew ever closer to her parents’ home, Viazovska tried every day to convince them to leave. But her 85-year-old grandmother, who had experienced war and occupation as a child during World War II, refused, and her parents would not leave her behind. Her grandmother “could not imagine she will not die in Ukraine,” Viazovska said, “because she spent all her life there.”
In March, a Russian airstrike leveled the Antonov airplane factory where her father had worked in the waning years of the Soviet era; Viazovska had attended kindergarten nearby. Fortunately for Viazovska’s family and other Kyiv residents, Russia shifted the focus of its war effort to the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine later that month. But the war is not over. Viazovska’s sisters spoke of friends who have had to fight, including some who have died.
...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/ukrainian-mathematician-maryna-viazovska-wins-fields-medal-20220705/
He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal.
June Huh wasn’t interested in mathematics until a chance encounter during his sixth year of college. Now his profound insights connecting combinatorics and geometry have led to math’s highest honor.
Jordana Cepelewicz
Senior Writer
July 5, 2022
June Huh often finds himself lost. Every afternoon, he takes a long walk around Princeton University, where he’s a professor in the mathematics department. On this particular day in mid-May, he’s making his way through the woods around the nearby Institute for Advanced Study — “Just so you know,” he says as he considers a fork in the path ahead, “I don’t know where we are” — pausing every so often to point out the subtle movements of wildlife hiding beneath leaves or behind trees. Among the animals he spots over the next two hours of wandering are a pair of frogs, a red-crested bird, a turtle the size of a thimble, and a quick-footed fox, each given its own quiet moment of observation.
“I’m very good at finding stuff,” he says. “That’s one of my special abilities.”
Huh, 39, has now been awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, for his ability to wander through mathematical landscapes and find just the right objects — objects that he then uses to get the seemingly disparate fields of geometry and combinatorics to talk to each other in new and exciting ways. Starting in graduate school, he has solved several major problems in combinatorics, forging a circuitous route by way of other branches of math to get to the heart of each proof. Every time, finding that path is akin to a “little miracle,” Huh said.
One might say the same of his path into mathematics itself: that it was characterized by much wandering and a series of small miracles. When he was younger, Huh had no desire to be a mathematician. He was indifferent to the subject, and he dropped out of high school to become a poet. It would take a chance encounter during his university years — and many moments of feeling lost — for him to find that mathematics held what he’d been looking for all along.
...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/june-huh-high-school-dropout-wins-the-fields-medal-20220705/
= new reply since forum marked as read