Vera Pulyuy!
A winner at just twenty-six!
Although she had not broken Professor Lu's record, winning at that age was still exceptionally rare.
And what surprised people most was not just her age, but her gender.
Before her, the only female mathematician to have won the Fields Medal was Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born professor at Stanford University. Sadly, she had died of breast cancer in 2017, the second year after receiving the award.
In other words, Vera would be the world's only living female Fields Medalist.
"Fields Medal winners are getting younger and younger. First Scholze, then Professor Lu, and now this Vera Pulyuy..."
Watching the young, beautiful figure onstage, Xu Chenyang applauded from his seat and said with a weary note in his voice, "Sometimes, seeing all these young people emerge one after another really makes me feel old."
Four years ago had been his last chance to get his hands on a Fields Medal.
Yet, almost without any suspense, he had ultimately missed out.
There was little to regret. After all, the Fields Medal drew its candidates from the entire mathematical community, and winners were selected only once every four years. Without an illustrious academic lineage, one needed a result that astonished the world. With both, winning was practically a certainty.
Take Lu Zhou, for example. He belonged to Grothendieck's academic lineage, and his advisor was Deligne, one of the leading figures of the time. Add an outstanding achievement like proving the Goldbach conjecture, and even without his later work on the Navier-Stokes equations, the International Mathematical Union could not possibly have made him wait another cycle.
Then there was Scholze. Although his advisor, Michelle Rapoport, was not a particularly famous heavyweight, he had at least come out of the University of Bonn, part of Faltings's academic circle.