08.08.18 – Professor Maryna Viazovska is one of the invited speakers at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), which is hosted in Rio de Janeiro. She gave a talk about her research on sharp sphere packings.

The International Congress of Mathematics, the largest conference of mathematics, was founded in the 1890s and is based on an idea of the German mathematicians Klein and Cantor. The first ICM was held in Zürich in 1897 and is since hosted every four years. The Fields medals and other prestigious awards are delivered during the ICM opening ceremony.

Professor Maryna Viazovska, who holds the Chair of Number Theory at EPFL, has been invited to give one of the sectional lectures in Combinatorics and Number Theory. The speakers are chosen by the International Mathematical Union and are representative of major scientific achievements in their mathematical field.

Born in Kiev in 1984, Maryna Viazovska is famous for her solution to the sphere packing problem. She completed her BSc in Mathematics in 2005 at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev, her MSc in 2007 at the University of Kaiserslautern, and her PhD in 2013 at the University of Bonn.

It was during her postdoctoral research at the Berlin Mathematical School and at the Humboldt University of Berlin that she took on and resolved the question of sphere packing in dimensions 8 and 24. In December 2016, she accepted EPFL’s offer to become an assistant tenure-track professor and was promoted to full professor in January 2018.

Awards and distinctions:

Salem Prize (2016)

Clay Research Award (2017)

SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2017)

European Prize in Combinatorics (2017)

New Horizons in Mathematics Prize (2018)