June Huh wins the 2022 Fields Medal, highest award in math

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June Huh wins the 2022 Fields Medal, highest award in math

Published: 05 Jul. 2022, 19:02 Updated: 05 Jul. 2022, 19:32

June Huh receives the Fields Medal at the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) on Tuesday at Helsinki, Finland. [YONHAP]

June Huh, a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, won the Fields Medal at the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) on Tuesday, becoming the first person of Korean descent to win the math award.

The Fields Medal is an international prize awarded every four years to mathematicians under 40 for their “outstanding mathematical achievement,” according to the International Mathematical Union (IMU). Known as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics," it is considered the highest honor for a mathematician.

Huh, the 39-year-old Korean-American who also serves as a distinguished professor of mathematics at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), was one of this year’s four recipients of the medal.

He was recognized for solving conjectures in combinatorics — a field of counting combinations of possible configurations such as graphs or designs, also called combinational mathematics — using algebraic geometry, which uses abstract algebra to define geometry, especially curves.

He provided a proof for Read’s Conjecture, a conjecture made by mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota in 1968 and an important problem in the field of combinatorics.

June Huh, the Korean-American professor of mathematics at Princeton University, who won the Fields Medal for the first time for a Korean descendant [MINISTRY OF SCIENCE AND ICT]

The Fields Medal

“When I was young, math was like a faraway land surrounded by giant walls that I could not climb,” said Huh. “I grew up in Korea, and I dreamed of becoming a poet to express the inexpressible. I eventually learned that mathematics is a way of doing that.”

Huh was known as a late bloomer by his peers.

Born in Stanford, California, he spent most of his younger days in Korea, attending elementary school, high school and university in Korea. Although he showed talent in mathematics, he dropped out of high school after he failed to settle down and took the qualification exam instead.

He entered Seoul National University (SNU) as a physics major but showed more interest in mathematics, and had to attend school for six years because he failed many of his physics classes. He fully switched to mathematics and received a master’s degree in mathematics at SNU and a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan.

“My son isn’t particularly bright, but I do think that the aptitude for mathematics and science runs in our family,” said Huh Myung-hoe, father of June Huh and a professor of statistics at Korea University.

“I feel proud not only as a father but to see a Korean member of the mathematical field receive a Fields Medal.”

His research has helped the advancement of various technologies such as telecommunications, integrated circuit design for chips, transportation, logistics, machine learning and statistical physics. He has won numerous awards, including the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize in 2019 and the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Science for physics and mathematics in 2021.

BY YOON SO-YEON [[email protected]]