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Maryna Viazovska, winner of Ukrainian fields, ‘changed forever’ by war.

#Maryna #Viazovska #winner #Ukrainian #fields #changed #war

Ukraine’s mathematics professor Maryna Viazovska, who won the top mathematics prize, the Fields Medal, on Tuesday, said her life was “changed forever” when Russia invaded her homeland.

The 37-year-old’s parents and sisters were living in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv when the war began in February.

“I couldn’t think of anything else, including math,” she said in a video while accepting the award at a ceremony in Helsinki.

Her sisters – along with their young nephew and niece – were evacuated from Kyiv and are now living with her in Switzerland, where she works at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne.

Viazovska and three other mathematicians received the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize in mathematics, in Helsinki after the ceremony was moved from Saint Petersburg to the Finnish capital in response to the war in Moscow.

She is only the second woman to receive the prize, given to mathematicians under 40, since its inception in 1936.

The other laureate, Iranian Maryam Mirzakhani, died of breast cancer in 2017, just three years after winning the award.

– “Terrible War” –

Viazovska was born in Kyiv in 1984 when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union.

In Ukraine, she studied at the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv before earning a master’s degree from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany and a PhD from the University of Bonn.

Since 2018 she has held the chair for number theory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Her husband Daniil Evtushinsky is a physicist at the Swiss Institute.

In the first days of the war, the math lessons “helped me to forget this fear and this pain inside me,” she said.

At the ceremony, she paid tribute to Julia Zdanovska, a 21-year-old mathematician who was killed in a Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in March.

“Yulia was a person full of light and her big dream was to teach math to children in Ukraine,” Viazovska said.

“When young people die, you think: ‘What good is my job as a teacher if young, talented people are wasted in this terrible war?'”

– 13 years to find the “magic formula” –

She won the Fields Medal for her work on sphere packing, which has plagued mathematicians for hundreds of years.

It is essentially about packing balls as compactly as possible in a container.

According to legend, the initial concern was how many cannonballs could be packed in a ship, Viazovska said.

After hundreds of years, mathematicians had solved the problem in three dimensions by stacking them in a pyramid like oranges in a supermarket.

But extending the theory to other dimensions – possible in mathematics – had proved elusive.

However, Viazovska worked on the problem from 2003 to 2016 and found a “magic formula” that solved the problem in dimensions eight and 24, she said.

“Maryna did something really wonderful here,” said MIT mathematician Henry Cohn at the ceremony. “As soon as this paper became available, everyone was amazed.”

Philippe Moustrou, from France’s Toulouse University, told AFP it’s “not like she’s found something just waiting to be discovered – she’s found the extra ingredient”.

But Viazovska’s thoughts remain on the war – and on the hopeful return of a peace that was once taken for granted.

“What I like most about Kyiv are the green parks, the quiet places and the old churches. I understand there will be traces of the war there now and it’s a scary thought,” she said.

“But Kyiv is one of the eternal cities. I hope to return soon one day.”

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#Maryna #Viazovska #winner #Ukrainian #fields #changed #war

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