2024 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award goes to Claire Voisin

The two laureates have made “outstanding contributions” to the development of two sides of geometry that involve “spaces of high dimensions which are difficult to visualize and necessitate new mathematical techniques to understand and study,” in the words of the award citation

• They have successfully “crossed the boundary” between two types of geometry, exchanging ideas and tools that have “inspired a high level of activity in international research” in this branch of mathematics.
• These two areas of geometry have acquired special importance in recent years on account of their lines of connection with theories of quantum physics, a discipline exploring the fundamental properties of matter and energy on the subatomic scale.

The utility of a “source of knowledge” with “a very precise notion of what is true”

Claire Voisin sees mathematics as primarily “a fact of civilization,” with a cultural value comparable to that of music: “Doing mathematics,” she affirms, “is a source of knowledge, a way of attaining knowledge that is at the root of something fundamental in human activity.” On the one hand, she says, is the fact that mathematicians “have a very precise notion of what is true, of what is known and what is not known. For us, a key point is to prove. And when something is not proved, we cannot call it a statement.” Claire Voisin also stakes a claim for mathematics as an essential mental discipline: “For me, it’s a form of concentration and I think many people today do not realize how important it is to know how to concentrate.”