The Fields Medal is an international mathematics award proposed by Canadian mathematician Fields. It is one of the highest international awards in the field of mathematics. Because the Nobel Prize does not include a mathematics prize, the Fields Medal is also known as the "Nobel Prize in mathematics".
The Fields Medal is awarded every four years. It is evaluated by the International Mathematical Union and awarded to 2-4 young mathematicians who are no more than 40 years old and have made outstanding contributions. So far, 2 Chinese mathematicians have won this honor, namely the mathematician Yau Shing-Tung who won the award in 1982 and the mathematician Terence Tao who won the award in 2006.
Marina Vyazovska
This year, Ukrainian female mathematician Marina Vyazovska, together with Frenchman Hugo Dumini-Copan, British James Maynard, Americans and Xu Ji'er (Korean) jointly won this year's Fields Medal. Vyazovska also became the second woman in history to win this honor (the first female winner of the Fields Medal was the Iranian female mathematician Mariam Mirzakhani who won the award in 2014).
Vyazovska, born in 1984 in Kiev, , the capital of Ukraine during the Soviet era, is 37 years old and has been a professor of mathematics since 2017.
Vyazovska's research direction is the century-old problem of optimizing the compact stacking of spheres, known as "Kepler's conjecture" and "the orange merchant's problem": how to stack oranges efficiently on a fruit stand, which has been practiced since the 16th century baffles mathematicians. Vyazovska's greatest contribution was to find the magical proof of the optimal stacking of spheres in dimension 8, and was praised for bringing a new look to mathematics. The practical value of the research results will be in error-correcting codes for telecommunications signal interference and microscopic description of certain states of gases.
