Fields Medal

Terence Tao, who has been called the “Mozart of Mathematics,” wrote an essay in 2007 about the common ingredients in “good” mathematical research. In this episode, the Fields Medalist joins Steven Strogatz to revisit the topic.

Four Fields Medals were awarded for major breakthroughs in geometry, combinatorics, statistical physics and number theory, even as mathematicians continued to wrestle with how computers are changing the discipline.

On his way to winning a Fields Medal, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding questions about prime numbers that have stumped mathematicians for centuries.

With Hugo Duminil-Copin, thinking rarely happens without moving. His insights into the flow-related properties of complex networks have earned him the Fields Medal.

June Huh wasn’t interested in mathematics until a chance encounter during his sixth year of college. Now his profound insights connecting combinatorics and geometry have led to math’s highest honor.

With her homeland mired in war, the sphere-packing number theorist Maryna Viazovska has become the second woman to win a Fields Medal in the award’s 86-year history.

Akshay Venkatesh, a former prodigy who struggled with the genius stereotype, has won a Fields Medal for his “profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subjects in mathematics.”

The 30-year-old math sensation Peter Scholze is now one of the youngest Fields medalists for “the revolution that he launched in arithmetic geometry.”

The mathematician Caucher Birkar was born on a subsistence farm and raised in the middle of the brutal war between Iran and Iraq. After fleeing to England, he has gone on to impose order on a wild landscape of mathematical equations.