From avoiding math to becoming noted mathematician, June Huh proves there is no hurry to figure out life

Hyderabad: A Korean-American Mathematician, June Huh, recently won the prestigious Fields Medal, often referred to as the ‘Nobel Prize of Mathematics’. But unlike other credited mathematicians, Huh was not a mathematical prodigy growing up. In fact, he says that he wasn’t good at math.

He was born in 1983 in California, where his parents were finishing their graduate school. Once done, they moved to Seoul in South Korea. His father taught statistics and his mother Russian language and literature.

In his interviews, Huh stated that he didn’t quite enjoy going to school. Though he loved to learn, he could not in a typical classroom setting. To quench his thirst for knowledge, he would read volumes of encyclopedias and absorb knowledge from his surroundings.

From a young age, he often avoided math whenever possible. He for sure had no interest in becoming a mathematician. He wanted to be a poet. At the age of 16, he dropped out of high school to pursue his creative dreams but none of his writings were published.

Huh eventually enrolled at the Seoul National University where he majored in physics and astronomy. He also met his wife, Nayoung Kim while at college. But there was always a lack of clarity in his approach towards building a career and frequently skipped classes.

It took him about six years to graduate and in his sixth year, he enrolled in a math class taught by Heisuke Hironaka, a famous Japanese mathematician, who himself is a recipient of Fields Medal. This can be considered a turning point in Huh’s life and the beginning of his ever-growing passion for math.

Hironaka’s lectures were different from others. He would teach about what he was currently working on unlike other undergraduate courses, where everything the answers were already available. This is what caught Huh’s drifting attention when he felt that he was trying to do something no one really knew how to do.

He then proceeded to complete a Master’s degree in algebraic geometry and singularity theory at Seoul National University, while frequently traveling to Japan with Hironaka and acting as his personal assistant.

When Huh applied to American Universities for his Ph.D., he was rejected by all but one. The University of Illinois accepted him and he did his Ph.D. studies there in 2009, before transferring in 2011 to the University of Michigan. He graduated in 2014 with a thesis written under the direction of Mircea Mustata at the age of 31. By then, Huh had realized that math gave him what poetry could not.

During his Ph.D., Huh resolved a theory that had been unresolved for more than 40 years. Since then, he received several more awards and recognitions, the latest being the Fields Medal for applying the ideas of Hodge’s theory to combinatorics, which deals with the study of countable discrete structures, to solve problems.

He is currently a professor at Princeton University and was previously a professor at Stanford University and the Institute of Advanced Studies.

From avoiding math as a kid to trying his hand at poetry and then developing an interest in math and being a noted mathematician today, June Huh’s journey proves that there is no need to figure out life at an early age. Sometimes, going with the flow is all one needs to do.