Many congratulations to the four recipients of the 2022 Fields Medal, which were announced by the IMU at a ceremony in Helsinki this morning. The winners were Hugo Duminil-Copin (Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques), for groundbreaking work on the maths of phase transitions; June Huh (Princeton University), for work on combinatorics and algebraic geometry; James Maynard (University of Oxford and Managing Editor of the Journal of the LMS), for his work on number theory; and Maryna Viazovska (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), for a groundbreaking proof in the theory of sphere packings.
The Fields Medal is awarded (traditionally to mathematicians under the age of 40) to recognise outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement. Ukrainian mathematician (and LMS Honorary Member) Maryna Viazovska is only the second woman to win a Fields Medal, after Maryam Mirzakhani, who won in 2014. During her speech, she said, “Peace is something I always took for granted. Now I understand how wrong I was about that […] Kyiv is one of those eternal cities. One day soon, I hope to return.”
Plus Magazine will be undertaking promotional work at the awards ceremony and lectures over the next few days; you can read more about the work of the Fields Medal winners, listen to podcasts and read interviews with key figures, on their website at https://plus.maths.org/content/, or follow their Twitter account at https://twitter.com/plusmathsorg.