ICM 2022 awarding ceremonies (1)

Hugo Duminil-Copin, June Huh, James Maynard and Maryna Viazovska were awarded the Fields Medal 2022 and Mark Braverman was awarded the Abacus Prize 2022.

I am writing from Helsinki where I attended the meeting of the General Assembly of the IMU and yesterday I took part in the moving award ceremonies of ICM2022 hosted by Aalto University.  This will be a first post about the ICM 2020 award ceremonies.

The opening day of ICM2022 was exciting. Hugo Duminil-Copin, June Huh, James Maynard and Maryna Viazovska were awarded the Fields Medals 2022. Mark Braverman was awarded the Abacus Prize. The event was videotaped and can be found here.

In the ceremony, I gave the loudation for June Huh.  Here are the slides of my talk. The preliminary version of my proceeding paper is here on the IMU site. Please alert me about mistakes in my paper or suggestion for changes or additions. (I already found that on two occasions I embarrassingly wrote “Brandle” Instead of “Braden”, sorry for that.)

The IMU site contains a lot of material about the Fields medalist and other prize winners. It contains beautiful videos, and preliminary versions of the proceeding papers by the medalists and by those giving the loudations.

Andrei Okounkov wrote four wonderful detailed “popular scientific expositions” (those are available in the IMU site) which give much scientific background as well as Andrei’s own scientific perspective. It is a great read for wide audience of mathematicians, ranging from  advanced undergraduate students.  Experts will also enjoy Andrei’s perspective. (I think that Andrei may write a fifth piece on Braverman’s work.)

Svetlana Jitomirskaya was awarded the Ladyzhenskaya Prize in Mathematical Physics (in a ceremony two days earlier), Barry Mazur was awarded the Chern Prize, Eliott Lieb was awarded the Gauss Prize, and Nikolai Andreev was awarded the Leelavati Prize.

I hope to discuss these awards and some further personal and mathematical reflections in a subsequent post.

Congratulations Hugo, June, James, Maryna, Mark, Svetlana, Barry, Elliott, and Nikolai!

Here on my Blog

Let me give some links to discussions here on the blog on works by laureates.

I wrote about Maryna Viazovska’s amazing breakthrough in the post  A Breakthrough by Maryna Viazovska Leading to the Long Awaited Solutions for the Densest Packing Problem in Dimensions 8 and 24; Henry Cohn, Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller, Danylo Radchenko, and Maryna Viazovska: Universal optimality of the E8 and Leech lattices and interpolation formulas:

I reported here in 2009 on the startling solution by Mark Braverman of the Linial-Nisan conjecture.

The story of James Maynard startling results and the gap between primes story is describes in this post.  In July 2014 we ran at HUJI a beautiful learning seminar on small gaps between primes, where James Maynard gave a series of three lectures. His result on “bounded intervals containing many primes” both strengthened and simplified Yitang Zhang’s earlier amazing result on “bounded intervals containing two primes.”  Maynard developed large chunks of his approach independently from Zhang’s work.

I reported about two results by Hugo Duminil-Copin : After the start of the pandemic bur before the war of Ukraine I had a “cheer-you-up” corner and in this post,  to cheer you up,  I wrote about a breakthrough by Hugo Duminil-Copin, Karol Kajetan Kozlowski, Dmitry Krachun, Ioan Manolescu, Mendes Oulamara  and yet another wonderful result by Hugo with Vincent Tasion. In this 2015 post I wrote about another breakthrough by Hugo and Vincent.

And,  of course, I wrote several times about June Huh. Here are a few examples: About Huh’s 2018 ICM talk; ICM 2018 Rio (4): Huh; Balog & Morris; Wormald; about the Mihail-vazirani conjecture  Nima Anari, Kuikui Liu, Shayan Oveis Gharan, and Cynthia Vinzant Solved the Mihail-Vazirani Conjecture for Matroids! ; About the early works on the Heron-Rota-Welsh conjecture for representable matroids; and about the full solution of the Heron-Rota-Welsh conjecture by Adiprasito, Huh, and Katz.

In this post we tried to cheer you up with “harmonic polytope”, which arose in Ardila, Denham, and Huh’s work on the Lagrangian geometry of matroids and were further studied by Federico Ardila and Laura Escobar.