News

In a special ceremony at ICM 2018 today, the Kurdish mathematician Caucher Birkar was presented with a replacement of the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in math, awarded to brilliant young academics. His original medal was stolen just minutes after he received it, along with three other colleagues, at the opening ceremony of the massive international math conference, last Wednesday.

Click here to read the post

Whether he wants to be or not, Peter Scholze is one of the big stars of this year’s ICM. He was also a huge favourite to win the Fields Medal months before the winners were announced on Wednesday 1st August. His Plenary Lecture on ‘Period Maps in p-adic Geometry’ was so popular, RioCentro staff needed to open the upper levels of seating in Pavilion 6 on Saturday morning. Everyone wanted to see the young rock star in action.

Click here to read the post

Alessio Figalli, a newly minted Fields medalist, gave his ICM plenary talk in front of thousands of young and old mathematicians. But the two most important people in the audience were Luigi Ambrosio and 2010 Fields medalist Cédric Villani — the two men who mentored Figalli to his Ph.D. He was awarded the Fields medal on August 1 for this “his contributions to the theory of optimal transport and his applications in partial differential equations, metric geometry, and probability.” Figalli has worked as a mathematics professor at ETH Zurich since 2016.

Click here to read the post

If one of the greatest pleasures in life is the feeling of really helping others, Ingrid Daubechies must be one of the happiest people at the ICM 2018. Her work in pure mathematics has been applied to various fields including image compression, data storage, paleontology and also in the restoration of classic works of art.

Click here to read the post

Luigi Ambrosio won the Cacioppoli prize of the Italian Mathematical Union in 1998. He is a full professor at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, one of Italy’s best higher education institutions. But Ambrosio might now be best known for mentoring and shepherding Alessio Figalli to a Fields medal.

Click here to read the post

On the cutting edge of Dynamical Systems research, Lai-Sang Young is not one to shy away from a challenge. Her primary field of mathematics, Dynamical Systems, is a relatively recent development in mathematics but is quickly growing and branching out into other areas. Dynamical systems look at evolutions through time for processes – the study of change of moving objects and evolving systems.

Click here to read the post