39岁韩裔数学家获2022年度菲尔兹奖！韩国总统尹锡悦：见证韩国已迈入发达国家行列！（附视频&摘要稿）

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7月5日，有着数学界“诺贝尔奖”称号的菲尔兹奖揭晓了，这也是数学界的最高奖项菲尔兹奖揭晓了！2022年，共有4位伟大的数学家获奖。本次获奖名单中包括之前呼声最高的乌克兰女数学家Viazovska，还有一位许埈珥异军突起，成为首个获奖的韩裔数学家。

39岁的许埈珥将Hodge理论引入了组合学，成功证明了几何格的Dowling–Wilson猜想、拟阵的Heron–Rota–Welsh猜想、强梅森猜想，以及发展了洛伦兹多项式理论。（组合代数几何）

小时候数学不好、高中辍学当诗人。后来为生计学做记者，结果在24岁那年偶然听了节菲尔兹奖得主的课，突然就被打通任督二脉，开始学习，在进入数学界15年后，39岁的他登上了数学界的最高领奖台。这是2022年度新晋菲尔茨奖得主许埈珥的传奇经历。

韩国总统尹锡悦在获悉喜报之后，向韩裔美籍数学家许埈珥致贺电，祝其获得菲尔兹奖。尹锡悦表示，韩裔数学家荣获被誉为数学领域诺贝尔奖的菲尔兹奖见证韩国已迈入发达国家行列，这是为数学等基础科学献身的人们所努力的硕果。从小学到研究生在韩国就读的年轻数学家获此奖项更是令人振奋。

尹锡悦对许埈珥挑战人类智慧的极限，扩展数学基础而付出的努力和热情给予高度赞赏。他说，希望许埈珥和国内外数学家们通过活跃的研究活动，成为开启人类智慧新道路的指南针。

许埈珥是谁？

这位韩裔数学家凭什么获得菲尔茨奖？

↓↓↓ 上下滑动，查看摘要稿 ↓↓↓

Most top mathematicians discovered the subject when they were young, often excelling in international competitions.

By contrast, math was a weakness for June Huh, who was born in California and grew up in South Korea. “I was pretty good at most subjects except math,” he said. “Math was notably mediocre, on average, meaning on some tests I did reasonably OK. But other tests, I nearly failed.”

As a teenager, Dr. Huh wanted to be a poet, and he spent a couple of years after high school chasing that creative pursuit. But none of his writings were ever published. When he entered Seoul National University, he studied physics and astronomy and considered a career as a science journalist.

Looking back, he recognizes flashes of mathematical insight. In middle school in the 1990s, he was playing a computer game, “The 11th Hour.” The game included a puzzle of four knights, two black and two white, placed on a small, oddly shaped chess board.

The task was to exchange the positions of the black and white knights. He spent more than a week flailing before he realized the key to the solution was to find which squares the knights could move to. The chess puzzle could be recast as a graph where each knight can move to a neighboring unoccupied space, and a solution could be seen more easily.

Recasting math problems by simplifying them and translating them in a way that makes a solution more obvious has been the key to many breakthroughs. “The two formulations are logically indistinguishable, but our intuition works in only one of them,” Dr. Huh said.

It was only in his last year of college, when he was 23, that he discovered math again. That year, Heisuke Hironaka, a Japanese mathematician who had won a Fields Medal in 1970, was a visiting professor at Seoul National.

Dr. Hironaka was teaching a class about algebraic geometry, and Dr. Huh, long before receiving a Ph.D., thinking he could write an article about Dr. Hironaka, attended. “He’s like a superstar in most of East Asia,” Dr. Huh said of Dr. Hironaka.

Initially, the course attracted more than 100 students, Dr. Huh said. But most of the students quickly found the material incomprehensible and dropped the class. Dr. Huh continued.

“After like three lectures, there were like five of us,” he said.

Dr. Huh started getting lunch with Dr. Hironaka to discuss math.

“It was mostly him talking to me,” Dr. Huh said, “and my goal was to pretend to understand something and react in the right way so that the conversation kept going. It was a challenging task because I really didn’t know what was going on.”

Dr. Huh graduated and started working on a master’s degree with Dr. Hironaka. In 2009, Dr. Huh applied to about a dozen graduate schools in the United States to pursue a doctoral degree.

“I was fairly confident that despite all my failed math courses in my undergrad transcript, I had an enthusiastic letter from a Fields Medalist, so I would be accepted from many, many grad schools.”

All but one rejected him — the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign put him on a waiting list before finally accepting him.

“It was a very suspenseful few weeks,” Dr. Huh said.

At Illinois, he started the work that brought him to prominence in the field of combinatorics, an area of math that figures out the number of ways things can be shuffled. At first glance, it looks like playing with Tinker Toys.

Consider a triangle, a simple geometric object — what mathematicians call a graph — with three edges and three vertices where the edges meet.

One can then start asking questions like, given a certain number of colors, how many ways are there to color the vertices with the rule that the vertices at each end of an edge cannot be the same color? The mathematical expression that gives the answer is called a chromatic polynomial.

More complex chromatic polynomials can be written for more complex geometric objects.

Using tools from his work with Dr. Hironaka, Dr. Huh proved Read’s conjecture, which described the mathematical properties of these chromatic polynomials.

In 2015, Dr. Huh, together with Eric Katz of Ohio State University and Karim Adiprasito of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, proved the Rota Conjecture, which involved more abstract combinatorial objects known as matroids instead of triangles and other graphs.

For the matroids, there are another set of polynomials, which exhibit behavior similar to chromatic polynomials.

Their proof pulled in an esoteric piece of algebraic geometry known as Hodge theory, named after William Vallance Douglas Hodge, a British mathematician.

But what Hodge had developed, “was just one instance of this mysterious, ubiquitous appearance of the same pattern across all of the mathematical disciplines,” Dr. Huh said. “The truth is that we, even the top experts in the field, don’t know what it really is.”

许埈珥（June Huh）现在是普林斯顿大学数学系的一名教授。

他出生于美国加州，在2岁时返回韩国后，直到硕士毕业前一直在韩国就读。

他于2007年毕业于首尔大学数理科学系·物理天文学，2009年和2014年分别取得同校数理科学系硕士学位和美国密歇根大学博士学位。

可以说，顶级数学家在年轻时，往往都会在国际比赛中有着出色的表现。然而，许埈珥小时候的数学成绩却并不怎么好：「我对大多数科目都很擅长，除了数学。」

上了高中之后，许埈珥的理想是成为一名诗人，于是他真的就在上高一时辍学去写诗了。