Today's guest is Hugo Dumonel Kupin, who won the coveted Fields Medal in 2022.

I wanted to find out more about how he won it and what it's like to receive such a coveted

prize. Our conversation also stumbled across Hugo's desire

for a fake or replica medal so he can more easily take it on foreign trips and school visits and

the like. A shorter video version of this interview is on our YouTube channel in which you can

see the man himself and that version also has some clips not included here particularly some visual explanations

of hugo's work that didn't really work as pure audio there'll be links to that and plenty more

in the description do you remember when you first heard of the fields medal do you know when you

even knew it was a thing that existed?

Oh, well, I don't remember exactly when, but I can tell you when I never, like when I didn't.

So, for instance, when I was a kid, I had zero clue that there was such a thing.

And it's actually sometimes weird because I'm talking to kids and you easily forget about the fact that they don't hear about.

So I definitely didn't know about it when I was a kid, probably even as a student, I didn't

have a good feeling of it.

And I have this funny story that I followed a class by Vendellin Werner during my fifth year of university.

And actually for the whole class, like the whole term, I had no clue.

He just received the fifth medal a few months earlier.

So this was really not so much of a thing.

It became more of a thing for me when I was PhD student because my advisor, he didn't have it

when it started, but he got it during my PhD. So there I got like full into the experience

of somebody getting the fist medal and realizing what it meant and so on.

Is it something mathematicians aspire to or dream of?

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