Fields Medal Awarded to Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska (Марина Сергіївна Вязовська)

 

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Congratulations to Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska (Ukrainian: Марина Сергіївна Вязовська) who this month became the first Ukrainian to with the Fields Medal. Every four years, the International Mathematical Union awards just two to four medals to mathematicians under the age of 40.

Viazovska was awarded her medal for her work in the optimal packaging density of spheres in higher dimensions. While another post in this blog approached this subject in four dimensions, her team expanded the classic packing density problem to 24 dimensions. Spheres in this problem each have 196,560 nearest neighbors.

Update 7/11/2022 - Alex Bellos created a few problems to help us appreciate the subjects of the winners of this year's Fields Medals: Can you solve it? The Fields medals for beginners | Mathematics | The Guardian