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 Medal 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 the 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 Medal. The event was videotaped and can be found here. Update: The five lectures of the medalists can be found here.

In the ceremony, I gave the laudation 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 if you have any suggestions for changes or additions. (I already found that on two occasions I embarrassingly wrote “Brändén” Instead of “Braden”, sorry for that.) Update: Here is a corrected version.

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 laudations.

Andrei Okounkov wrote four wonderful detailed “popular scientific expositions” (those are available on the IMU site) which provide 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.

Svetlana Jitomirskaya was awarded the Ladyzhenskaya Prize in Mathematical Physics (in a ceremony held two days earlier), Barry Mazur was awarded the Chern Medal, Elliott 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, and this additional post 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’s startling results and the gap between primes story is described 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 discussed two results by Hugo Duminil-Copin : After the start of the pandemic but before the war in Ukraine, I had a “cheer-you-up in difficult times” 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 Vanneuville and Vincent Tasion). In this 2015 post I wrote about another breakthrough by Hugo Duminil-Copinand Vincent Tasion. (And see this post for a picture of Hugo mentioning KKL and BKKKL.)

And,  of course, I wrote about June Huh several times. 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 came up in Ardila, Denham, and Huh’s work on the Lagrangian geometry of matroids and were further studied by Federico Ardila and Laura Escobar.