June Huh, an American-Korean mathematician, was born in Stanford before he moved to Korea with his family as a toddler. He grew up in Korea and, in his early days, never had a particular interest in mathematics.

Huh was more interested in poetry. At one stage, he dropped out of high school to pursue the art form, but it didn’t work out.

So he went to university, where it took him six years to do his undergraduate degree.

Huh eventually signed up for a course that changed his life. Heisuke Hironaka, a Japanese mathematician, ran the course. Hironaka had won the Fields Medal in 1970.

Hironaka was a quirky, charismatic character, and his course was on algebraic geometry. When it started, there were some 200 students. Within three weeks, there were only five.

Hironaka didn’t teach in the standard way. He included his students in what he was currently working on at the time. It was total exploration.

To Huh, this was exciting. He did his Masters and then, in 2009 in the United States, his PHD with Hironaka.

Within a short period, he solved a conjecture that had been unsolved for 40 years. He then solved another conjecture, called Rota’s conjecture.

This year, in 2022 and at 39 years of age, Huh won the Fields Medal. He says his big breakthrough came when he realised that you don’t need to think about three-dimensional space when doing geometry. It came when he let go of that assumption.