Monday, 13 March 2023 12:13

Gauss Medal 2023 for Maryna Viazovska

Gauss Medal 2023 for Maryna Viazovska Fred Merz

The Braunschweig Scientific Society (BWG) awards its Gauss Medal for 2023 to Maryna Viazovska. The young mathematics professor from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) is known to a broader public as the second woman ever to receive the Fields Medal (which is often regarded as the Nobel Prize in mathematics).

Maryna Viazovska, born in 1984 in Kiev, Ukraine, studied mathematics at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. In 2013 she received her Ph.D. from the University of Bonn under the supervision of Prof. Don Zagier. She conducts her further research at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques near Paris and at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Here, being a Dirichlet postdoc at the Berlin Mathematical School, she made a breakthrough on the mathematical problem of close-packed spheres.

At the end of 2016, the number theorist became an assistant professor (tenure track) at EPFL, and in 2017 she was Minerva Distinguished Visitor at Princeton University, USA. In 2018 she became a full professor at EPFL. In 2022 she received the Fields Medal for the proof that the E8 lattice provides the densest packing of identical spheres in 8 dimensions, and further contributions to related extremal problems and interpolation problems in Fourier analysis.

The BWG awards the Carl Friedrich Gauss Medal to scholars from Germany and abroad every year in the Old Town Hall in Braunschweig.