World-renowned Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska, a winner of the KSE Foundation’s Talents for Ukraine program, has received the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics. She became only the second woman in the award’s history and the second representative of Ukraine to win it. In 2014, the Fields Medal was awarded to Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani.

Viazovska was awarded the prize for solving the problem of the densest packing of identical spheres in eight-dimensional space. In her proof, the Ukrainian mathematician combined methods from geometry, Fourier analysis, and number theory to solve a problem that mathematicians had worked on for decades.

Peter Sarnak, a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, congratulated the Ukrainian scholar on her win, noting: “Viazovska invented new and unexpected tools that allowed her to overcome the natural obstacles that had set us back for years from solving this problem,” The Guardian reports.