Baek Byung-yeul is a journalist at The Korea Times focused on cultural content, including films and cultural events in South Korea. You can contact him at baekby@koreatimes.co.kr to share your insights.
'Stable environment needed to nurture Korean mathematicians': June Huh
June Huh, left, a Korean American mathematician and winner of this year's Fields Medal, speaks during an online press conference at Korea Science and Technology Center in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap
By Baek Byung-yeul
By Baek Byung-yeul
June Huh, who won the prestigious Fields Medal given to talented mathematicians under 40, said Wednesday that there should be an environment where young math scholars in Korea can conduct stable research with long-term goals in order to nurture prominent domestic researchers.
“A lot of young mathematicians are doing so well in Korea. I am just one of them and I feel pretty uncomfortable saying what needs to be done to produce more people like me. I hope that young mathematicians will be provided with a stable research environment where they can freely pursue long-term projects, instead of just trying to achieve short-term goals,” Huh told reporters during an online press conference at Korea Science and Technology Center in Seoul.
The International Mathematical Union (IMU) announced on Tuesday that this year's Fields Medal went to the 39-year-old mathematician, who is a professor at Princeton University, and is also a distinguished professor of mathematics at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS).
First introduced in 1936, the Fields Medal has been recognizing young math scholars who have achieved major contributions to the field.
The IMU said it decided to give the award to Huh for his achievement “bringing the ideas of Hodge theory to combinatorics, the proof of the Dowling―Wilson conjecture for geometric lattices, the proof of the Heron―Rota―Welsh conjecture for matroids, the development of the theory of Lorentzian polynomials and the proof of the strong Mason conjecture.”
Born in 1983 in California, Huh moved to Korea at the age of 2 and studied here until he received a master's degree. He majored in physics and astronomy at Seoul National University and studied mathematics at the university's graduate school. He moved back to the United States to obtain a doctoral degree at the University of Michigan.
President Yoon Suk-yeol sent a message congratulating Huh.
“It is a great achievement demonstrating that Korea has already entered the ranks of advanced countries in the field of mathematics,” Yoon said.
“The efforts of those who have devoted themselves to mathematics and other basic science fields have paid off. I am thrilled that a young mathematician who studied in Korea from elementary school to graduate school won the award,” Yoon said in a congratulatory letter sent to Huh, Tuesday.
June Huh shows the Fields medal he received during the International Congress of Mathematicians 2022 in Helsinki, Finland, Tuesday. AP-Yonhap
Huh said he has fond memories of his childhood spent in Korea.
“I think I had a very warm and satisfying childhood. In elementary, middle, and high school, 40 to 50 students are gathered in one class all day long who get to know each other well. It was a valuable time that gave me a lot of nourishing experiences to grow into who I am,” he said.
When asked about what made him pursue mathematics, he said discussing the subject with fellow scholars and conducting joint research made him to fall in love with the subject.
“Joint research has become very active in modern mathematics. It is much more efficient to think with colleagues than to do it alone. Through this, you can go far and deep. These experiences gave math researchers a lot of pleasure,” he said.
“If each of us is a bowl of thought, we can understand the difficult structure of mathematics that we cannot understand at all because the amount of water in each bowl increases twice or three times every time we work together. Thinking about such a process gives me great satisfaction personally, I have not been able to leave the field of mathematics since I fell in love with it a decade ago,” he added.