On the 5th of July, the Fields medals 2022 were awarded to four mathematicians. The four mathematicians that won the Fields medals this year are:
Hugo Duminil-Copin: For solving longstanding problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions in statistical physics, especially in dimensions three and four.
June Huh: For bringing the ideas of Hodge theory to combinatorics, the proof of the Dowling–Wilson conjecture for geometric lattices, the proof of the Heron–Rota–Welsh conjecture for matroids, the development of the theory of Lorentzian polynomials, and the proof of the strong Mason conjecture.
James Maynard: For contributions to analytic number theory, which have led to major advances in the understanding of the structure of prime numbers and in Diophantine approximation.
Maryna Viazovska: For the proof that the E8 lattice provides the densest packing of identical spheres in 8 dimensions, and further contributions to related extremal problems and interpolation problems in Fourier analysis.
These short descriptions are taken from the official site of the Internation Mathematical Union. These four mathematicians work on a broad range of topics, mathematical physics, percolation theory, graph theory, combinatorics, geometry, and number theory.
Interested to read more?
Summer vacations are coming and many of you are searching for your summer reads! Here are some suggestions in case you want to dive intp the beautiful mathematics of the four newest Fields medallists. If you want to read more about their research then you can have a look at the following very interesting articles:
An overview of the four mathematician's work, written by Kenneth Chang, and published in the New York Times. Here you can also see a nice chess puzzle that June Huh solved using graph theory!
Of course, you can have a look at Quanta Magazine and read their four articles on the work of these mathematicians.
You can also have a look at this article with title A breakthrough in sphere packing: the search for magic functions written by David de Laat and Frank Vallentin for the Dutch mathematics magazine Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde in 2016. In this article, the work of Maryna Viazovska is presented. A part of the article is very technical but there is a nice introduction and an interview at the end with Viazovska and her colleagues.
If you want to learn more about prime numbers and the work of James Maynard we have some extra videos for you. When mathematics videos are concerned, Numberphile is one of the places to look! We recommend two videos, Twin Primes Conjecture, and Gaps between Primes. We also recommend this lecture where mathematician Yitang Zhang explains some ideas from his work on Bounded gaps between primes. Who is Yitang Zhang? In the article in the New York Times we read:"In 2013, Yitang Zhang, then a little-known mathematician at the University of New Hampshire, published a breakthrough in the problem — that there are an infinite number of prime pairs whose separation is less than 70 million. (That was an arbitrarily large number where Dr. Zhang’s equations worked.)"
In the work of Hugo Duminil-Copin percolation theory plays an important role. If you want to learn more about this fascinating field in mathematics you can read this article published on the Network Pages!
These are definitely enough articles to read and videos to watch. It is almost certain that in the work of these mathematicians there are beautiful and interesting ideas for everyone's interests!
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