June Huh becomes first Korean descent to win Fields Medal

[Photo by Yonhap]

June Huh, a Korean American mathematician and Princeton University professor, has won the Fields Medal, becoming the first Korean descent to win the prestigious award.

The Fields Medal, often called the ‘Nobel Prize of mathematics,’ was founded in 1936 to recognize and support young mathematicians under 40 who have made outstanding contributions in the field of mathematics.

The International Mathematical Union (IMU) Tuesday named Huh one of the four Field Medal recipients this year. Huh’s achievements mentioned by the IMU included the proof of the Dowling-Wilson conjecture for geometric lattices, and the proof of the Heron-Rota-Welsh conjecture for matroids.

The 39-year-old professor is the first-ever scholar of Korean descent to win the award presented by the IMU every four years.

“Thankfully, my colleagues in academia have highlighted my role. However, my life and study will not be much different from before,” Huh told Maeil Business Newspaper.

“Professor Huh’s award of the Fields Prize is another achievement to Korea after the IMU upgraded the country’s national mathematics grade to the highest in February,” said Keum Jong-hae, President of Korean Mathematical Society.

Huh was born in California in 1983 to Korean scholar parents but grew up in South Korea. He studied physics and astronomy at Seoul National University (SNU) and mathematics at the university's graduate school. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 2014.

Huh is often described as a late bloomer as he quit high school to write poetry and flunked many times in physics and astronomy exams at university. He began to study math after taking class of Heisuke Hironaka, a renowned Japanese mathematician and a 1970 Fields Medal recipient, who taught at SNU.

The other three Fields medal recipients are Hugo Duminil-Copin, 36, of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques just south of Paris; James Maynard, 35, of the University of Oxford in England; and Maryna Viazovska, 37, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

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