The Fields Medal is one of the highest international awards in the field of mathematics, equivalent to the Olympic mathematics gold medal. Because the Nobel Prize does not include a mathematics prize, the award is also known as the "Nobel Prize" in mathematics. Every four years,

The Fields Medal is one of the highest international awards in the field of mathematics, equivalent to the Olympic mathematics gold medal . Because there is no Mathematics Award for the Nobel Prize , this award is also known as the "Nobel Prize" in mathematics. Every four years, the International Mathematical Union in Helsinki honors talented mathematicians under the age of 40.

This year's awards recognize pioneering research on topics such as prime numbers and the packing or efficient arrangement of spheres in eight-dimensional space. The award-winning young mathematicians - Hugo Duminil-Copin (France), June Huh (USA), Maryna Viazovska (Ukraine) and James Maynard (UK) - have answered questions that have vexed the mathematical community for years.

Hugo Duminil-Copin

Duminil-Copin of the French Institute for Advanced Study was awarded for his work on the probability theory of phase changes, which refers to how matter changes form, such as when water freezes. Duminil-Copin's work focuses on how ferromagnetic objects transition from a nonmagnetic to a magnetic phase, known as Ising models (a class of stochastic process models that describe phase transitions in matter). Previous physicists have used it to create simplified models of reality in one and two dimensions, but solving the Ising model in three dimensions is more difficult. "The ability to calculate the formula accurately has completely collapsed," Duminil-Copin said. "No one knows how to calculate it accurately." Although the three-dimensional Ising model has not been completely solved, Duminil-Copin's work demonstrated the phase transition in the three-dimensional Ising model. Similar to phase transitions in 2D models.

June Huh

June Huh of Princeton University won the prize for a series of achievements: He was the first to apply geometric concepts to combinatorics (the mathematics of counting). Through collaboration with colleagues, he answered previously unsolved questions in combinatorics and provided a solution to explain the mathematical properties of complex geometric objects. You know, as a kid Huh would try to avoid math. "I was good in most subjects except math," said Huh, who almost failed. Huh, who dropped out of school to become a poet, studied mathematics at the age of 23 with the Japanese mathematician Hironaka Heiyu who won the Fields Medal in 1970, and fell in love with mathematics ever since.

Maryna Viazovska

html For 113 years, Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska, a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, has been working on an arrangement called E8-Lattice, which shows how to arrange spheres in eight dimensions in the smallest possible space. "Sphere filling is a very natural geometric problem. You have a big box, you have an infinite number of equal spheres, and you try to fit as many balls into the box as possible," said Viazovska, who is now trying to fill the box in 24 dimensions. Pack balls medium-densely. Her award is the second time the commission has awarded the medal to a woman.

Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska shows off her medal after winning the 2022 Fields Medal in Mathematics

James Maynard

There is a mathematical theory that there are infinitely many prime numbers, but the larger the number, the farther the distance between two prime numbers. University of Oxford In an award-winning, groundbreaking study, James Maynard shows that this is not always the case: in some cases, prime numbers can be close. However, in other fields, prime numbers can be very far away. Maynard said, "Many of the mathematical legends in the Fields Medal inspired me as a child, and now that I am receiving the award, it feels incredible and completely surreal."