13.12.19 – Professor Maryna Viazovska at EPFL has won the 2019 Fermat Prize for research in Mathematics for her solution to the famous sphere packing problems in dimensions 8 and 24.

The 2019 Fermat prize in mathematics has been awarded to Professor Maryna Viazovska, who holds EPFL’s Chair of Number Theory, for her solution to the sphere packing problem. The Fermat prize of mathematics is a bi-annual named after the famous French mathematician Pierre de Fermat. The prize rewards mathematicians under 45 years old whose research words are in Number Theory, analytic geometry, probability and research related to the variational principles.

Maryna Viazovska’s solution to the sphere packing problem in dimension 8 and in dimension 24 brought her worldwide fame and a large number of awards, such as the Salem Prize, the New Horizons in mathematics prize or more recently the Satter Prize.

The Fermat prize was created in 1989 and is awarded by the Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse – hometown of Pierre de Fermat.

The 2019 Fermat prize is awarded jointly to Maryna and to Prof. Alexei Borodin (MIT) for the invention of integrable probability theory, “ a new area at the interface of representation theory, combinatorics and statistical physics”. The official ceremony will take place in spring 2020 in Toulouse.