
-
Sub sinks Morocco as Nigeria are crowned African football queens
-
Bournemouth stroll past Everton in Premier League friendly
-
Thailand says open to 'dialogue' with Cambodia to end conflict
-
England sweat on Stokes' bowling fitness in bid for India series win
-
Powerhouse Gyokeres can give Arsenal missing edge
-
Britain leads calls for airdrops as Gaza hunger crisis deepens
-
Ecuador deports more than 800 Colombian inmates as Bogota cries foul
-
Arsenal sign Swedish international Viktor Gyokeres
-
Spain's pioneers 'knocking down walls' with run to Euro 2025 final
-
Greece asks for EU help in battling wildfires
-
Rahul and Gill frustrate England in fourth Test after Stokes century
-
Norris reassured by pole after Belgian Grand Prix 'worries'
-
England ready to meet challenge of 'fantastic' Spain in Euro 2025 final
-
US migrant raids spark boom for private detention providers
-
'Make America Gay Again': Amsterdam pride gets political
-
Over 600 malnourished children die in six months in Nigeria: MSF
-
Hamilton holds hands up after 'unacceptable' qualifying
-
Norris on pole as McLaren lock-out front row at Belgian Grand Prix
-
Johannesburg to host first LIV Golf event in Africa
-
Pogacar on cusp of fourth Tour title as Groves solos to stage 20 win
-
Motor rally accident kills three spectators in France
-
Lando Norris claims pole for Belgian Grand Prix
-
'Famine', 'starvation': the challenges in defining Gaza's plight
-
Stokes ends two-year wait for Test hundred before Gill holds firm for India
-
Australian Groves wins penultimate Tour stage, Pogacar in yellow
-
Root has no interest in Tendulkar run-record hype
-
Too early to judge Gill and his young India team, says Dev
-
Liverpool beaten 4-2 by AC Milan in Hong Kong pre-season friendly
-
NASA says it will lose about 20 percent of its workforce
-
Farrell says win over Australia 'what dreams are made of'
-
Trump plays golf in Scotland as protesters rally
-
Stokes ends two-year wait for Test hundred before India collapse in fourth Test
-
Lions stage stunning comeback to beat Wallabies and win series
-
Thai-Cambodia clashes spread along frontier as death toll rises
-
Stokes ends two-year wait for Test hundred as England press for India series win
-
Liverpool to remember Jota with permanent tribute
-
'We are neighbours': fleeing Thais and Cambodians call for peace
-
Verstappen begins new Red Bull era with Belgian sprint win
-
French left urges Macron to act over US plan to destroy contraceptives
-
Howe confident Isak will stay at Newcastle despite transfer talk
-
Belgian region grapples with forever chemical scandal
-
New-look Australia focused on LA 2028 at swimming worlds
-
China urges global consensus on balancing AI development, security
-
David's century sparks Aussies to T20I clincher over WIndies
-
Death toll rises in Thai-Cambodian clashes despite ceasefire call
-
China prodigy takes on swimming world aged 12
-
UN gathering eyes solution to deadlocked Palestinian question
-
Polls open in Taiwan's high-stakes recall election
-
'Alien' lands at Comic-Con
-
Top footballers afraid to speak out against playing too many games: FIFPro chief
RBGPF | -1.52% | 73.88 | $ | |
SCU | 0% | 12.72 | $ | |
CMSD | 0.17% | 22.89 | $ | |
BCC | 1.94% | 88.14 | $ | |
SCS | 0.66% | 10.58 | $ | |
NGG | -0.11% | 72.15 | $ | |
GSK | -0.68% | 37.97 | $ | |
RELX | -1.86% | 52.73 | $ | |
RIO | -1.16% | 63.1 | $ | |
CMSC | 0.24% | 22.485 | $ | |
BCE | -0.95% | 24.2 | $ | |
RYCEF | -0.3% | 13.2 | $ | |
JRI | -0.46% | 13.09 | $ | |
VOD | -0.79% | 11.43 | $ | |
AZN | -1.4% | 72.66 | $ | |
BP | 0.22% | 32.2 | $ | |
BTI | -0.71% | 52.25 | $ |

Duminil-Copin, Fields-winning mathematician with 'aesthetic vision'
Hugo Duminil-Copin, a French mathematician whose visual approach helped him win the world's most prestigious mathematics prize the Fields Medal on Tuesday, said he "doesn't really fit into the cliches of a genius".
The 36-year-old, who has a messy head of hair and bright eyes beaming from behind glasses, told AFP that he is a "very, very normal person" who loves sport, his family and quiet moments of reflection.
But for Duminil-Copin, who specialises in probability theory, those quiet moments can lead to discoveries that won him the Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics.
He accepted the prize, which is awarded every four years to mathematicians under 40, at a ceremony in Finland's capital Helsinki.
The other winners were Britain's James Maynard of Oxford University, June Huh of Princeton in the United States and Ukraine's Maryna Viazovska, who is only the second ever woman laureate.
Duminil-Copin described with unabashed enthusiasm the happiness he finds in working with others in the search for answers -- whether or not they find one.
"It's the best, especially since it's a collective process, where all the beauty is in interacting with others," he said in an interview a few days before the prize was announced.
- A visual mind -
Born on August 26, 1985, Duminil-Copin has collected a raft of mathematics awards over the last decade.
At the age of 31, he was appointed professor at France's Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies in 2016.
"It's a place that seems made for me, for my creative part," he said of the green campus outside Paris.
It gives the mathematician that most precious resource for deep thinkers: time.
"This slowness in everyday life is very fruitful because I need time for ideas to come, for them to settle quietly, for them to take shape," he said.
At the campus, which is not far from where he grew up, Duminil-Copin uses his "very visual intuition" to take on the most complicated mathematical problems.
"There are very few formulas and many drawings" in his mind when he thinks about such problems, he said.
That "aesthetic vision" allows him to view mathematics with a "certain elegance", he added.
The Paris institute allows researchers to free themselves of all other obligations, including teaching.
But Duminil-Copin teaches anyway, retaining a professorship at the University of Geneva, saying that "in the end it is perhaps the most important aspect of this profession".
He may have inherited this passion from his father, a sports teacher, and mother, a dancer who became a teacher later in life.
When he was younger, Duminil-Copin envisioned becoming a teacher himself -- of maths, of course -- but his talent propelled him towards research.
Collaboration is at the heart of his outlook. If he provides mathematical tools to physicists, their work in turn may allow someone else in the future to find new applications for them.
"It's the whole community that really produces scientific progress," he said.
- Mental balance -
Duminil-Copin hailed the importance of two university professors to his career, Jean-Francois Le Gall, who also worked on probability theory, and fellow Fields Medal winner Wendelin Werner.
He said he fell in "love at first sight" with percolation theory during a class Werner taught on the subject, which falls under the branch of statistical physics.
It was in that class that Duminil-Copin first encountered Nienhuis's conjecture -- a "beautiful, elegant and completely mysterious" problem, he said.
"I solved it a few years later, almost without doing it on purpose."
As a child, Duminil-Copin preferred astronomy to mathematics.
He said he was "not pushed at all" by his parents to focus solely on his studies -- instead they were keen to "confront him with a variety of things" such as sport, music and friends.
The lesson seems to have stuck.
"When we talk about preparing to become a researcher we think of intelligence, academic training, but there is also a mental balance which is very important," he said.
New ideas can strike him "anytime, in the middle of the night or in the shower", he said.
But they will have to wait until he's back at work.
"My priority is on the personal side, to spend time with my daughter and my wife."
G.Schulte--BTB