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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

No no no, she is legit, no doubt here.

She was a star way before the current events. She solved a long-standing open problem in fundamental maths. This is the holy grail in maths research. The main resulting paper is single-author, so there is no doubt who did the work.

She got her PhD from Bonn in 2013 and became a full prof at EPFL in 2018 (in EU this type of progression takes 10-20 years, and this is extremely impressive even by US standards). It was very clear to everyone at that time that she would be big.

Or just look at the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04246 you can't fake that with politics.

Thanks for the paper link, it's very curious and surprisingly readable

Thank you for the answer, that's what I expected (as an answer, I mean).

And to respond to a HN-er above who was mentioning that he/she found my question "distasteful" and "insinuating", yes, the reality today is that lots of people involved on one side of the current conflict in Eastern Europe have been receiving prizes and media attention just because of their nationality at this present moment in history, not necessarily because of their actual work in their respective fields. Glad to see that the "judges" (I have no idea who gives up this award, or how) behind the Field Medals have steered clear of all that and have sticked to merit.

I find this question distasteful, since it's asked with nothing more than a vague insinuation of Viazovska potentially not being "that good" as motivation. Here's the long citation:

"A very long-standing problem in mathematics is to find the densest way to pack identical spheres in a given dimension. It has been known for some time that the hexagonal packing of circles is the densest packing in 2 dimensions, while in 1998 Hales gave a computer assisted proof of the Kepler conjecture that the faced centered cubic lattice packing gives the densest packing in 3 dimensions. The densest packing wasn't known in any other dimension until in 2016 Viazovska proved that the E8 lattice gave the densest packing in 8 dimensions and, very shortly afterwards, together with Cohn, Kumar, Miller and Radchenko, proved that the Leech lattice gave the densest packing in 24 dimensions. Viazovska's approach built off work of Cohn and Elkies, who had used the Poisson summation formula to give upper bounds on the possible density of sphere packings in any dimension. Their work had suggested that in 8 and 24 dimensions there might exist a radial Schwartz function with very special properties (for instance it and its Fourier transform should vanish at the lengths of vectors in the respective lattice packings) which would give an upper bound equal to the lower bound coming from the known lattice packings. Viazovska invented a completely new method to produce such functions based on the theory of modular forms.

Viazovska has developed these ideas in other directions. With Radchenko she proved the unexpected result that any even Schwartz function such that it and its Fourier transform vanish at the square root of every non-negative integer must be identically zero. In fact they showed that any even Schwartz function can be written [...] for certain special functions a_n and b_n.

With Cohn, Kumar, Miller and Radchenko she showed that the E8 and Leech lattice not only gave optimal sphere packings in dimensions 8 and 24, but that they minimize energy for every potential function that is a completely monotonic function of squared distance."

I agree that it is a distasteful question. But what is much more distasteful that it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for the answer to that question to be yes. Not that I am in any position to make that assessment.

So you admit you are in no position to make that assessment, but at the same time make the assessment that it is not out of the realm of possibility?

Maybe if in no position to make an assessment it is better not to make one?!

I'm not the person who made the statement. They asked the question. That's exactly the opposite of making an assessment. That person tries to find someone who CAN make that assessment to answer the question.

You wrote:

> I agree that it is a distasteful question. But what is much more distasteful that it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for the answer to that question to be yes.

So you said it is not out of the realm of possibility for it to be the case, that is an assessment. By your own statement, you are in no position to judge, so how do you know it is possible?

How do I know it's possible? Because it's decided by people. People are sensitive for these kinds of things. What I meant with assessment in this case is that I cannot judge whether this is happened in this specific case. As in I don't know enough about mathematics to make an assessment. Not I don't know enough about committees to say it's possible or not. I thought that would be clear from the post but I can see how you misunderstood it.

So what's so special about 8 and 24 dimensional space?

The short answer is that we don't really know; they are related to some of the most mysterious aspects of representation theory and number theory.

What we know is that these dimensions support lattice structures with exceptional symmetries. The intricate geometry of these symmetries interacts with number theory to provide spectral data (automorphic forms) that have very rare properties; this is the starting point for Maryna's investigations.

Okounkov's popular scientific exposition "The magic of 8 and 24", linked in the article, goes into considerable detail on the constructions.

They contain extremely many symmetries. The Leech Lattice is certainly a uniquely symmetrical object.

This is not an innocent question, this user is a Kremlin tool, reading his comments on reddit is pretty disgusting, here's for example blaming Ukraine for the fact Russia is bombing hospitals: https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/vp08m0/the_health_c...

Thank you, I've been an undercover agent on both reddit and HN for 15 (close to 16 years) now.

I'm curious, do you at least get paid for all this effort? Do you work remotely or commute to the office?

Nothing in the linked comment is untrue, and nothing in it justifies Putin's invasion.

He justifies bombing of children hospital in Odessa (far from the frontline) by the fact that Ukraine sometimes uses evacuated buildings on the frontline as bases.

The commenter stated that the Ukrainian Army often puts troops and military hardware near civilian infrastructure (true). They did not assert that this was the case for the specific Odessa hospital in question (merely that it was a possibility), or that this justifies Russian bombings.

The justification is implicit from the context.

What else do you find "implicit"? Does this Ukrainian Military set-up [1] in yet another school is implicit or explicit? Or using school buses [2] for military evacuation? And I wish those had been the only examples, they're not. And last but not least, do you find the salute accompanying these "Slava Ukraini" chants [3] explicit or implicit? They look pretty explicit to me.

[1] https://twitter.com/mdfzeh/status/1543222792363163658

[2] https://twitter.com/mdfzeh/status/1543306307385556992

[3] https://twitter.com/Numinis/status/1542056886299762690

Thanks for confirmation that it is in fact your hate of Ukrainian which motivated your comments here.

Maryna Viazovska received the Fields medal for her groundbreaking work on the optimality of the E8 and Leech lattices for sphere packings; she has been expected to win the Fields medal for 3 years now, long before the war.

I have read that the prizes were decided and communicated to the winners in January, before the start of the war.

Politics plays an important role in those awards, for example this year's awards were due to be presented at the ICM in Saint Petersburg, Russia but the ceremony was moved to Helsinki. But for this particular case, Maryna was on everyone's list and she has done exceptional work.

The choice of venue and the choice of Fields medal recipients are unrelated decisions, taken by different groups of people. Of course the former is much more strongly influenced by world events. And indeed, it took only a few days after the invasion to realize that the planned ICM in Saint Petersburg was impossible.

I wasn't even thinking about that, but then I watched all videos, and in hers she spends more time talking about the war than she does talking about her work. I understand she's been affected but that feels out of place here.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie, who got her second Nobel for Radium and Polonium discovery, named Polonium to bring attention to the Russian occupation of her Motherland - Poland. I don't see anything out of place with Maryna Viazovska talking about war as it may be hard to see anything more important than your Motherland, your people, being totally destroyed.

You misunderstood my comment. I said it felt out of place *here*, in a video dedicated to her mathematical work, hosted on mathunion.org (the clue is in the URL). Doesn't mean she cannot talk about the war in general. As for Marie Curie, I don't think they had Internet and 24-hour news channels back then. I don't need mathematicians to bring attention to the war in Ukraine when everyone is constantly talking about it already.

By then the occupation of Poland had been going for more than a century, so it wasn't about news. And in case of Maryna it also doesn't seem to be about news. It is her well-deserved chance and her choice to say what she thinks is needed to be said on such a momentous occasion.

She is, I expected her to win in 2018.

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