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In Times of Scarcity, War and Peace, a Ukrainian Finds the Magic in Math
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.
A Number Theorist Who Bridges Math and Time
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.”
A Master of Numbers and Shapes Who Is Rewriting Arithmetic
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.”
An Innovator Who Brings Order to an Infinitude of Equations
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.
A Traveler Who Finds Stability in the Natural World
The mathematician Alessio Figalli is rarely in one place for very long. But his work has established the stability of everything from crystals to weather fronts by using concepts derived from Napoleonic fortifications.
Handicapping the 2018 Fields Medal
Peter Scholze is a favorite to win one of the highest honors in mathematics for his contributions in number theory and geometry.
A Grand Vision for the Impossible
Subhash Khot’s bold conjecture is helping mathematicians explore the precise limits of computation.
In Noisy Equations, One Who Heard Music
Martin Hairer was named a 2014 Fields medalist for an epic masterpiece in stochastic analysis that colleagues say “created a whole world.”
A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces
Maryam Mirzakhani, who became the first woman Fields medalist for drawing deep connections between topology, geometry and dynamical systems, has died of cancer at the age of 40. This is our 2014 profile of her life and work.