On August 8, June Huh, professor of the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University, gave a lecture at the KAIST Auditorium (E15). Professor Huh was awarded the 2022 Fields Medal on July 5 — a prize awarded to two to four distinguished mathematicians by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) every four years — for his achievement in combinatorics, a branch of mathematics that focuses on the counting of finite structures.
Professor Huh graduated from the Department of Physics at Seoul National University and completed his PhD in Mathematics in 2014 under Professor Mircea Mustaţă at the University of Michigan. Mustaţă claims that Professor Huh “is a mathematician with an amazing intuition, who sees beautiful connections between different fields.”
Professor Huh proved the Rota conjecture, proposed in 1971, by using the Hodge theory. The Rota conjecture states that a family of matroids — a finite set that generalizes the concept of linear independence in vector spaces — in every finite field can only be represented by finitely many excluded minors N, which is obtained through a sequence of contraction and restriction operations of matroids. The Hodge theory is an approach in algebraic geometry that studies the cohomology groups, a sequence for abelian groups in topological space, of a manifold that is smooth with all orders of continuous partial derivatives through the use of partial differential equations. Simply worded, Professor Huh provided a novel intuition to prove an intricate conjecture of a discrete object from a geometric perspective. His contributions are not limited to the proof of the Rota conjecture; he has continuously contributed to the proof of more than 10 complex conjectures in combinatorics, such as the Read conjecture and the strong Mason conjecture in 2020 and has received various other awards such as the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2017.
Professor Huh’s award especially drew a great deal of attention in Korea because he is the first person of Korean descent to win the Fields medal since the first award in 1936. Professor Huh also has the significance of becoming the 9th faculty of Princeton University to win the Fields medal.
During the lecture, Huh took the time to answer KAIST students’ questions regarding his work and life as a mathematician, providing motivation and insights. The recorded video of the full lecture is uploaded and available to watch on the official KAIST YouTube channel.