Professor June Huh was one of four Fields medalists honored in July.
Dennis Applewhite/Princeton University
As a student in South Korea, June Huh envisioned a future as a poet or science journalist, according to her profile. new york times When Quanta MagazineIn his final year of college, however, he took a course in algebraic geometry, taught by Heisuke Hironaka, who won the 1970 Fields Medal Gold Medal. Working on the proof with Hironaka realigned Huh’s trajectory towards his mathematics career.
A decade and a half after taking that class, and a year after becoming a professor at Princeton University, in July, 39-year-old Hu is one of the four winners of the 2022 Fields Medal from the International Mathematical Union (IMU). was one of the mathematicians of Often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of mathematics,” the prize is awarded every four years and recognizes mathematicians under the age of 40 for “outstanding mathematical achievement in existing research and commitment to future achievements.” To do. Huh is best known for his work on geometric combinatorics. In a video produced by the Simmons Foundation, he describes the field as building spaces and using “geometric intuition to extract information.”
Huh, who declined an interview request from PAW, has perhaps the least traditional career path of this year’s Fields honorees. He was no child prodigy. Times His math performance was “remarkably mediocre” compared to his performance in other subjects. At Hironaka’s urging, he returned to the United States in 2009 to continue his graduate studies (born in California when his parents were graduate students). He gained attention for his first studies at the University of Illinois and received his Ph.D. he is at the University of Michigan. After serving as a Fellow and Visiting Professor at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the university’s faculty full-time.
He is the ninth Princeton University professor to receive the Fields Medal since Manjul Bhargava *01 in 2014. His 2018 recipient was Mr. Akshay Venkatesh*02, an alumnus, professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and visiting lecturer at Princeton University.
Fields’ announcement was made at the IMU Awards Ceremony on July 5, and Princeton University won three other major awards. Physicist Elliott Reeve received the Gauss Prize for his mathematical contributions to multiple fields, including quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, computational chemistry, and quantum information theory. Computer scientist Mark Braverman won the Abacus Medal for his work on information complexity and communication protocols. Also, his alumnus and professor at Harvard University, Barry Mazur*59, received his Churn His Medal, his Lifetime Achievement Award. According to the citation.
Earlier this year, Princeton University Professor Noga Alon was awarded the $1.2 million Shaw Prize for Mathematics and Science. The award was jointly awarded with Ehud Hrushovski, a professor at Oxford University who was an instructor and visiting assistant professor at Princeton University in the 1980s. The Shaw Prize Foundation honored the two researchers, recognizing them for “notable contributions to discrete mathematics and model theory, particularly with their interaction with algebraic geometry, topology, and computer science.”
Since 2004, the Shaw Awards have annually recognized winners in three fields: astronomy, mathematical sciences, life sciences and medicine. Past winners of the Mathematics Prize include János Kollár (2017) and Andrew Wiles (2005) from Princeton University.
