He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal. (2022)

Summary

Huh discovered that this kind of mathematics could give him what poetry could not: the ability to search for beauty outside himself, to try to grasp something external, objective and true, in a way that opened him up more than writing ever had. “You don’t think about your small self,” he said. “There’s no place for ego.” He found that unlike when he was a poet, he was never motivated by the desire for recognition. He just wanted to do math. Hironaka, perhaps recognizing this, took him under his wing. After Huh graduated and started a master’s program at Seoul National University — where he also met Nayoung Kim, now his wife — he spent a lot of time with Hironaka. During breaks, he followed the professor back to Japan, staying with him in Tokyo and Kyoto, carrying his bags, sharing meals, and of course continuing to discuss math. An Unexpected Discovery Huh applied to about a dozen doctoral programs in the U.S. But because of his undistinguished undergraduate experience, he was rejected by all of them save one. In 2009, he began his studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, before transferring to the University of Michigan in 2011 to complete his doctorate. 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. He was able to dedicate himself wholly to math, and he relished the freedom of exploration that had drawn him to the subject in the first place. He immediately stood out. As a beginning graduate student in Illinois, he proved a conjecture in graph theory that had been open for 40 years. In its simplest form, the problem, known as Read’s conjecture, concerned polynomials — equations like n4 + 5n3 + 6n2 + 3n + 1 — attached to graphs, which are collections of vertices (points) connected by edges (lines). In particular, let’s say you want to color the vertices of a graph so that no two adjacent vertic...