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A grand celebration was held in Riocentro this evening for the young winners of gold medals in the OBMEP (Brazilian Math Olympiad for Public Schools), the largest competition of its type in the world. 518 students from all over Brazil received their gold medals on the same stage that the Fields Medals were awarded only on Wednesday.

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The 1986 British Fields medallist knighted in 2012 for his contributions to mathematics, Simon Donaldson opens the second day of the International Congress of Mathematicians with an overview of how two different areas of differential geometry can overlap for astonishing, new results. Hundreds of eager mathematicians shuffle into the main Plenary Hall at half past eight in the morning to hear him speak.

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Sylvia Serfaty uses math to predict what happens in physical systems—physics, classical and quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, random matrices and even approximation theory. A professor at New York University, the French mathematician gave a plenary talk at ICM 2018 on August 2 called “Systems of Points with Coulomb interactions.” Serfaty’s work describes the patterns that particles form when they must stay together but at the same time are repulsed by each other.

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Presenting this morning at the 2018 ICM, scholar Rahul Pandharipande broke down the past decade’s progress of research into cohomology calculus for the moduli space of curves parallel to better understandings in other geometries. The Indian professor fielded questions from inquisitive listeners following his presentation, answering questions and greeting colleagues.

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“What do all Brazilians desire most in their wildest dreams?” Asked Etienne Ghys, French mathematician and researcher at the National Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps little reticent to give away their private desires, the rapt crowd of Brazilian Mathematical Olympiad medal winners remained silent, as Etienne played a clip from the 1980 film, ‘Bye Bye Brasil’, to reveal the answer: to snow in Brazil.

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Of the 60 Fields Medal winners since its launch in 1936, only one is female. Even in such male dominated fields this is an appalling statistic. Of the eight awards announced at this year’s ICM, no woman was among the winners. Of just over 200 speakers at the meeting, over 9 days, only 15% are female. The reasons for this are many, and it seems, still slightly unclear. The speakers at the ‘The Gender Gap in Mathematical and Natural Sciences from a Historical Perspective‘ on Thursday evening did an excellent job of highlighting and explaining the myriad factors that have contributed to why there still is, and has always been, a lack of women at the top of mathematics and physics.

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