credit EPFL/Fred Merz
Maryna Viazovska was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. After obtaining a Bachelor’s degree from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, she moved to Germany to obtain a Master’s degree at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (2007) before joining the University of Bonn, where she completed her PhD on modular forms in 2013. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Mathematical School and the Humboldt University of Berlin and a Minerva Distinguished Visitor at Princeton University.
In July 2022, for her work on the sphere-packing problem in dimensions 8 and 24, Prof. Viazovska received a Fields Medal, a prestigious honour often described as the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics”. She announced her results in March 2016. Prof. Viazovska, who holds the Chair of Number Theory at EPFL, Switzerland, is the second female Fields Medallist after Maryam Mirzakhani in 2014 and joins a list of over 60 mathematicians to have received this prestigious honour.
