5 July 2022 | Maryna Viazovska, who holds the Chair of Number Theory at EPFL, has received a Fields Medal, a prestigious honour often described as the Nobel Prize of Mathematics, for her work on the sphere-packing problem in 8 and 24 dimensions. Previously, the problem had been solved for only three dimensions or fewer. Another Fields Medal is awarded to University of Geneva mathematician Hugo Duminil-Copin.
At 37 years of age, Viazovska has become only the second female Fields Medalist – after Maryam Mirzakhani in 2014 – and joins a list of over 60 mathematicians to have received the prestigious honour to date. The Fields Medal was created in 1936 and is awarded every four years to one or more mathematicians under the age of 40.
