“You can do it.”
Maryna Viazovska is a Ukrainian mathematician, born in Kyiv. She is a full professor of Mathematics and holds the Chair of Number Theory at the Institute of Mathematics, School of Basic Sciences of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In 2022 she has been awarded a Fields Medal, the highest honor for a mathematician. At only 37 years old, she is the second woman in history to earn this prestigious award. The Fields Medal was created in 1936, it is awarded to mathematicians under the age of 40 and it is considered the Nobel Price for Mathematics (a field where the Nobel Foundation does not fund a formal award).
Maryna Viazovska excelled at mathematics at school and in 1998, she entered the Kyiv Natural Science Lyceum no. 145, a highly selective school with advanced mathematics and physics classes. After graduation, she did her bachelor's studies in Mathematics at the Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko National University. Here, she competed in the Mathematical Olympiad Competition in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005 and won the top award in 2002 and 2005, the year she was awarded her Bachelor’s Degree. She then moved to Germany, where she completed her Master’s Degree at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern and earned her Ph.D. in 2013 at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. After a time as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in France and at the Humboldt University of Berlin, in 2017 she was a Minerva Distinguished Visitor at Princeton University in the USA. She joined EPFL in 2017 as a tenure-track assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 2018.
Specialized in number theory, she has been awarded the Fields Medal for solving the problem of how to pack spheres in the most efficient way in a space with eight and twenty-four dimensions. Inspired by Kyiv mathematician Andriy Bondarenko, she started working on this long-standing packing problem in 2014. After two years of work, she announced the results with the right function in the spring of 2016. Then, working with colleagues, she solved the problem in dimension 24. The solution to the 8-dimensional case was published in the paper The sphere packing problem in dimension 8 (2017) and the 24-dimension case was also published in 2017 in the paper The sphere packing problem in dimension 24.
She received numerous prestigious distinctions for her remarkable achievements, mathematical breakthrough results in sphere packing, and contributions to number theory. These include the Salem Prize 2016, The European Prize of Combinatorics 2017, the Clay Research Award 2017, the 2017 Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy (SASTRA) Ramanujan Prize, the 2018 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, and the 2019 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics. She was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2021. She was appointed Senior Scholar at the Clay Mathematics Institute in July 2022. Sources: Maryna Viasovska EPFL; EPFL News; MT Mac Tutor
Keywords: theoretical mathematics, number theory, geometric optimization projects, sphere packing problem, modular forms, energy minimization, free interpolation formulas, signal processing
Lausanne – October 12th, 2022
How did you (decide to) become a scientist? I’ve not really decided, my life brought me here. When I was at school, I used to like mathematics. I started taking part in math competitions and I was good at them. I received an invitation to a school that specialized in mathematics, physics, and computer science [the Kyiv Natural Science Lyceum no. 145], I did the exam and the result was good. So, I started to study in that school and later, in high school I kept training for math and physics competitions. When I finished school, mathematics seemed to be a natural choice and when I finished university going for a Ph.D. also seemed a natural choice to me. After finishing the Ph.D., I had this feeling, like many people have, that ‘I’ve been in Academia for too long”. It was like there was no life outside Academia. I believe that at that point science became like a drug. I became addicted to science and I did what was in my power to stay in Academia. Eventually, I managed to be successful and now I’m here. Maybe this is not the most exciting story but it is a story about the force of inertia.
What is your drive and excitement in science and in doing what you do now? What drives me is the possibility that I have to make a discovery. Also, I think that pure math - all sciences but pure math in particular – is always like a competition. We have to solve problems, and often they are like puzzles. Then the question is: can I solve this puzzle? This is my main motivation: the excitement of discovery and the excitement of search.
Would you have one word to give as a gift to other women and more in general to young aspiring scientists, women or men? You can do it - if you want it.
Science is my passion… in your mother tongue. Mene zvutʹ Maryna i nauka tse moya prystrastʹ
