Meet the Ukrainian Number Theorist Who Won Math’s Highest Honor

Russian tanks and war planes began their assault on Ukraine, Maryna Viazovska's hometown, just weeks after she won the highest honor for a mathematician.

Viazovska's family was still in Ukranian. Viazovska's two sisters, a 9-year-old niece, and an 8-year-old nephew left for Switzerland. The drive west was so slow that they had to wait two days for the traffic to stop. After spending several days in a stranger's home, waiting for their turn as war refugees, the four walked across the border into Slovakia and boarded a flight to Geneva. They arrived in Lausanne on March 4 and stayed with Viazovska and her family.

The family of Viazovska stayed in Kyiv. Viazovska tried every day to convince her parents to leave. Her parents would not leave her behind, even though she had experienced war as a child. Viazovska's grandmother spent her entire life in Ukraine.

The factory where Viazovska's father worked in the waning years of the Soviet era was destroyed by a Russian airstrike in March. The focus of Russia's war effort in eastern Ukraine was shifted to the family of Viazovska. The war is still going on. Some of Viazovska's friends have died in fights.

Viazovska said in May that she hadn't gotten a lot of research done in the last few months. She said that she can't work when she's in conflict with someone.

Viazovska accepted her Fields medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Over 400 mathematicians signed a petition to boycott the conference in Russia due to the country's poor human rights record. The IMU pivoted to a virtual ICM after Russia invaded Ukraine.

The IMU cited Viazovska's proof that the E 8 lattice is the densest packing of spheres in eight dimensions at the ceremony. In the 86-year history of the medal, she is the only woman.

Henry Cohn, who was asked to give the official ICM talk celebrating her work, said that Viazovska manages to do things that are completely non-obvious that a lot of people tried and failed to do. She does them by finding things that nobody else had been able to find.

There is a second derivative.

On a rainy May afternoon, the location of the cole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne is hard to see. In English, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne is also known as the MIT of Europe. The idyllic signs of campus life can be seen at the end of a dual-use lane for bicycles and pedestrians that ducks under a small highway. The library and student center is three-dimensional and allows students to walk under and over each other. The sky can be seen from below through cylindrical shafts. One of those modular structures has a professor with a security access card open the double doors to the inner sanctum of the math department. The chaire d'Arithmétique is just past the portraits of Noether, Gauss, Klein, Dirichlet, Poincaré, Kovalevski, and Hilbert.