The First Korean Fields Medalist in Mathematics
The Fields Medal is renowned for its prestigious value, even comparable to the Nobel Prize. Every 4 years, the International Mathematical Union, or IMU, awards its Fields Medal to an individual with exceptional contributions in the mathematics field.
In 2022, the winner of the Fields Medal in Mathematics was June Huh, the first Korean to ever receive the Fields Medal. Huh pioneered not only in the fields of combinatorics, but also in geometry and topology. Huh was able to solve numerous conjectures like Read’s conjecture, the Strong Mason conjecture, and many more. In addition, Huh created a gateway between two seemingly discrete fields of mathematics: combinatorics and topology. While combinatorics revolves around the combination of numbers, topology revolves around spatial properties of shapes.
When Huh was younger, mathematics was not his favorite subject. Until high school, Huh wanted to pursue his dreams of becoming a poet. He did not hesitate to drop out of high school to pursue writing poetry. In Korea, he was even considered as a “Supoja,” or a person who gives up on math.
Later in college, however, Huh realizes how he was not a Supoja after all. In Huh’s 6th year as an undergraduate, Huh attended one of Hironaka’s mathematics courses where he was inspired to pursue mathematics. At that time, Hironaka was known for winning the Fields Medal in 1970. After attending Hironaka’s courses, Huh realized that mathematics was able to offer him, as he states, “the beauty outside himself.” With this mindset, Huh proved a conjecture in graduate school that had been unsolved for 40 years: Read’s Conjecture.
Read’s Conjecture is mainly concerned with special kinds of polynomials called chromatic polynomials. Mathematicians were able to find some properties of the chromatic polynomial coefficients like log concavity which states that for three consecutive numbers, the middle value squared is at least larger than the other numbers combined. However, their main properties were still very much in the unknown.
Then came Huh, who found some properties in the fields of Algebraic Geometry and Singularity Theory that contain log concavity. As a result, Huh was able to solve the Read conjecture by finding a way to match the specific chromatic polynomial coefficients to a way Algebraic Geometry and Singularity theory could hold true.
Solving a 40-year-old problem is not the main takeaway of this conjecture. The fact that Huh was able to find a deeper meaning to the structure of mathematics in terms of topology and combinatorics was the groundbreaking result that no other mathematician was able to do. From a Supoja to a famous mathematician, Huh gives out the message to the world that persistence is a path to success.