Clara Grima

The German mathematician Gerd Faltings has won the Abel Prize, awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Faltings, director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, became a celebrity at the age of 29 for proving a conjecture that earned him the Fields Medal in 1986. His contributions have revolutionised arithmetic geometry, a branch of mathematics at the intersection of the two oldest: number theory and geometry.

A team at Google DeepMind has developed AlphaProof, an artificial intelligence system that learns to find formal proofs by training on millions of self-formulated problems. According to the authors, the system “substantially improves upon previous-generation results on historical problems from mathematical competitions.” Specifically, in the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) for secondary school students, “this performance, achieved after several days of computation, resulted in a score equivalent to that of a silver medalist, marking the first time an AI system has achieved medal-level performance.” The results are published in the journal Nature.

Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska was today awarded one of four Fields Medals, considered the Nobel Prize in mathematics. After Iran's Maryam Mirzakhan, who received it in 2014, she is the second woman to be honoured with this prestigious award.

Mathematician Maryna Viazovska (Kiev, Ukraine; 1984) has today been awarded one of the four Fields Medals, considered the Nobel Prize in Mathematics. She is the second woman to be awarded this prize, after the Iranian Maryam Mirzakhan, who received it in 2014.