Maryna Viazovska became the second female mathematician to win a Fields Medal for her work in proving that the E8 lattice provides the densest packing method of the same sphere in 8 dimensions, among others. The first was the Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who won the Fields Medal in 2014 but died prematurely of breast cancer in 2017. Because of the war, Viazovska admits she has struggled to focus on mathematics in recent months. She currently lives in Lausanne, Switzerland, as a professor of mathematics at EPFL, and her family still lives in Ukraine. When the war broke out, her two sisters, along with her 9-year-old niece and 8-year-old nephew, set out on the road to Lausanne, Switzerland. The road was slow and painful, they first waited two days for traffic to resume, spent several days as refugees in a stranger’s house, crossed the border into Slovakia in one night, arrived in Budapest with the help of the Red Cross, and finally boarded the The flight to Geneva, arriving in Lausanne on March 4, lives with Viazovska and her husband, their 13-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter. Her parents and grandmother remain in Kyiv. The 85-year-old grandmother lived through World War II and refused to leave. Grandmother lived in Ukraine all her life and died in Ukraine. Russia in March bombed the Antonov aircraft factory where her father had worked at the end of the Soviet era. Fortunately for the family living in Kyiv, Russia’s strategic focus has since shifted to the Donbas region of Udon. But the war is not over yet.
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