We're very excited to be going to this year's European Congress of Mathematics (ECM), which will take place in Seville, Spain, in July!

One of the interesting things that happens at an ECM is that the European Mathematical Society (EMS) awards ten prizes to mathematicians who are under the age of 35 at the start of the year the prizes are awarded. When looking through previous winners we noticed that quite a few winners of EMS prizes later go on to win a Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics, awarded every four years at the International Congress of mathematicians.

To celebrate the run-up to this year's ECM, we launch our Euromaths miniseries of podcasts, which revisits interviews with Fields Medallists from years past, who previously also won an EMS prize. We start the series by revisiting our interview with Hugo Duminil-Copin in 2022, when won a Fields Medal for his work transforming the mathematical theory of phase transitions in statistical physics. Hugo first won an EMS prize in 2016. We hope you enjoy the interview!

Hugo Duminil-Copin (Photo Matteo Fieni)

You can read about Hugo's work in this short introduction and this in-depth article.

This content was originally produced as part of our collaborations with the London Mathematical Society and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. You can find all our content on the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians here.

Artificial intelligence is changing our lives. Many of us use the voice activated features on our phones to recognise, understand and fairly complex speech. Students use ChatGPT to do their homework. And doctors use AI algorithms to help diagnose many diseases from medical data. But how is AI changing the lives of mathematicians?

In this podcast we speak to Yang-Hui He from the London Institute of Mathematical Sciences about his recent work on the evocatively titled murmuration conjecture. This exciting new conjecture came about due to both artificial and human intelligence, and reveals patterns in the prime numbers that look like flocks of birds.

A murmuration of starlings. Photo: Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0.

We were speaking to Yang as part of our coverage of the research programme, Black holes: bridges between number theory and holographic quantum information, held at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge. The programme brought together a fascinating array of experts in black holes and quantum theory, with mathematicians and computer scientists. You can read more in our coverage of the programme here.

This content was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.

"The 20th century was the interaction of geometry and physics, and the 21st century is the interaction of number theory with physics." This intriguing insight comes from our recent discussion with Yang-Hui He from the London Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Yang told us an amazing story about the flow of ideas between mathematics and physics, that involves some of the most celebrated achievements in the last century.

Yang-Hui He (Photo Rajarshi Maiti – CC BY-SA 4.0)

You can find out more about the ideas we discussed with Yang in this podcast in the accompanying articles String theory: A promise from physics and String theory: Convincing mathematics. And stay tuned for the second part of our conversation with Yang in the next episode!

We were speaking to Yang about a research programme, Black holes: bridges between number theory and holographic quantum information, held at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge. The programme brought together a fascinating array of experts in black holes and quantum theory, with mathematicians and computer scientists. You can read more in our coverage of the programme here.

This content was produced as part of our collaboration with the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INI) – you can find all the content from our collaboration here. The INI is an international research centre and our neighbour here on the University of Cambridge's maths campus. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from all over the world, and is open to all. Visit www.newton.ac.uk to find out more.