The Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska is only the second woman to be awarded the renowned Fields Medal.
She received the mathematics award on Tuesday at Aalto University in Finland with the three other prizewinners Hugo Duminil-Copin, June Huh and James Maynard.
The prestige of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) medal is comparable to that of the Nobel prizes.
The 37-year-old Viazovska is only the second woman after Maryam Mirzakhani in 2014 to receive a Fields Medal, said the Swiss university EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), where Viazovska is a professor specializing in number theory.
The mathematician from Kyiv also held positions in Germany over the course of her career, for example at the Berlin Mathematical School and the Humboldt University in Berlin.
According to EPFL, Viazovska has been awarded for solving the problem of sphere packing in dimensions 8 and 24.
“The question of how to pack balls as close together as possible, e.g.
B. with an orange pyramid, mathematics has been busy for more than four centuries.
The award was first presented in 1936 and is intended every four years to honor up to four outstanding researchers in mathematics who must not be older than 40 years.
In 2018, the Bonn mathematician Peter Scholze was only the second German to receive the Fields Medal.
Another high-ranking mathematics award is the Abel Prize, which is awarded annually and without age restrictions.