Four mathematicians received the Fields medal on Tuesday in Helsinki, including the Frenchman Hugo Duminil-Copin and the Ukrainian Maryna Viazovska, the second woman to receive this prestigious distinction since the creation of the prize in 1936. The two other winners of this award issued all four, considered the equivalent of a “Mathematics Nobel”, are US-based researcher June Huh and Briton James Maynard. The medal celebrates the “exceptional discoveries” of researchers under the age of 40.
Hugo Duminil-Copin collects distinctions
“Producing ideas” with an “aesthetic vision”: such is the credo of Hugo Duminil-Copin, rewarded for work that he considers essential to share through teaching, the “heart” of his profession. With a bright gaze behind large glasses, the 36-year-old probabilist describes the happiness he feels in seeking rather than finding.
“It’s the best, especially since it’s a collective process, where all the beauty is in the interaction with others”, explained to AFP, before the announcement of his prize, this researcher who has been collecting distinctions for ten years.
Professor at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies
Born on August 26, 1985, Hugo Duminil-Copin was appointed permanent professor in 2016 at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES), which has seen seniors as prestigious as they are legendary, such as the mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck. “It’s a place that’s made for me, for my creative part,” he says. A haven of greenery, located in Bures-sur-Yvette (Essonne) on the campus of the University of Paris-Saclay, which knows how to “offer time to the researcher”.
“This slowness in everyday life is super fruitful because I need time for ideas to come, for them to settle quietly, for them to take shape,” he explains.
In this place, close to his native Chatenay-Malabry, he can exercise a “very visual intuition” of the mathematical problems to be solved, in a head where “there are very few formulas and many drawings”. All with the concern for a “certain elegance” in the demonstration.
Teaching, the opportunity to constantly rework concepts
Even if the secret of IHES is to free the researcher from any obligation, including that of teaching, Hugo Duminil-Copin sacrifices to this passion. He also works at the University of Geneva, which offered him his first position after his doctorate. Because teaching is “perhaps in the end the most important aspect of this profession”, according to him. A conviction inherited from a sports teacher father, and a dancer mother who became a teacher.
He himself saw himself as a maths teacher, before realizing that he had to “still try to do research”. Teaching is an opportunity for him to constantly rework concepts, to better distill them. A work that also serves the researcher. Just like the exchange with physicists who use its mathematical tools to derive applications. For him, it is “the whole community that really produces scientific progress”.
From his journey to the aggregation of maths at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he remembers key encounters. Including the one with this preparatory class teacher, at Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, and his “very enthusiastic vision of mathematics”.
And also two university professors. Probabilist Jean-François Le Gall, such an “incredible teacher”, unfolding his lesson with an ease that made him feel “light”. And in Master, Wendelin Werner, Fields medalist too, whose course devoted to the theory of percolation will be a “love at first sight”, engaging Hugo Duminil-Copin in the mathematical branch of statistical physics.
“I don’t fit too much into the clichés of genius”
Today, he cherishes the company of his “brothers in arms and closest colleagues”, Ion Manolescu and Vincent Tassion, respectively professors at the Universities of Friborg and Zurich. “It’s the joy of math, at its height when I work with them, thanks to an exchange of ideas which represents a perpetual stimulation”, he says.
He nevertheless sees himself as “someone very, very normal. I don’t fit too much into the clichés of genius”.
Mental balance is also “super important”
As a child, he preferred astronomy to mathematics, and was “not pushed at all by his parents”. Who were keen to “confront him with various things”, with a lot of sport, music and friends. “When we talk about preparing to become a researcher, we think of intelligence, academic training. But there is also this mental balance which is very important”, he notes.
Case in point, the ideas of this young father continue to come to his mind “anytime, in the middle of the night or in the shower”. But he forces himself to put them aside to treat them at work, because his “priority is on the personal side, to spend time with my daughter and with my wife”.