Fields Medal – Quanta Magazine

What Makes for ‘Good’ Mathematics?

Steven Strogatz — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 14:03:12 +0000

We tend to think of mathematics as purely logical, but the teaching of math, its values, its usefulness and its workings are packed with nuance. So what is “good” mathematics? In 2007, the mathematician Terence Tao wrote an essay for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society that sought to answer this question. Today, as the recipient of a Fields Medal, a Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics...

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The Year in Math

Konstantin Kakaes — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 16:00:09 +0000

We can think of a mathematician as a kind of archaeologist, painstakingly brushing dust off the hidden structures of the world. But the structures mathematicians reveal are not only durable, but also inevitable. They could never have been any other way. They are also remarkably interconnected: Though each year the mathematical frontier continues to expand as new discoveries are made...

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A Solver of the Hardest Easy Problems About Prime Numbers

Erica Klarreich — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 07:21:31 +0000

In 2013, one of the best — but also one of the worst — things that can happen to a mathematician happened to James Maynard. Fresh out of graduate school, he solved one of the discipline’s oldest and most central problems, about the spacing of prime numbers. It was an achievement that ordinarily would have garnered him fame even beyond the cloistered world of pure math research. There was just one...

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For His Sporting Approach to Math, a Fields Medal

Jordana Cepelewicz — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 07:20:13 +0000

The math department at the University of Geneva is usually quiet and still — that is, except when voices boom down the hall from the office of Hugo Duminil-Copin, a not infrequent occurrence. “We were known within the department for shouting at each other all the time, because we would get very excited about what we were doing,” said Ioan Manolescu, a mathematician at the University of Fribourg...

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He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal.

Jordana Cepelewicz — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 07:19:44 +0000

June Huh often finds himself lost. Every afternoon, he takes a long walk around Princeton University, where he’s a professor in the mathematics department. On this particular day in mid-May, he’s making his way through the woods around the nearby Institute for Advanced Study — “Just so you know,” he says as he considers a fork in the path ahead, “I don’t know where we are” — pausing every so often...

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