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June Huh dropped out to become a poet, now he’s won a Fields Medal (2022)

June Huh wasn’t interested in mathematics until a chance encounter during his sixth year of college. Now his profound insights connecting combinatorics and geometry have led to math’s highest honor.

He felt an urge to revisit books he’d first encountered when he was younger — including Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and several novels by the German author Hermann Hesse — so that’s what he did. Despite the challenges — living in a new country, spending time apart from Kim (she stayed at Seoul National University for her doctorate in mathematics) — Huh cherished his experiences in graduate school. Huh’s key idea was to find a way to construct an algebraic variety such that those associated numbers were precisely the coefficients of the chromatic polynomial of the graph from the original question.

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