Inside, the office is spare, pragmatic: just a computer, printer, chalkboard, papers and books, with few personal effects. The place where the magic happens seems not so much a physical location in space-time as a higher-dimensional world of abstractions in Viazovska’s mind.
Across the small table in her office, the world’s preeminent sphere-packing number theorist begins to recount her story in her usual matter-of-fact manner. Gradually, she breaks form and smiles, her eyes light up and lift upward, and she grows ever more animated while summoning memories from the past.
The earliest memory is of walking with her grandmother as a 3-year-old from her family’s utilitarian Khrushchyovka apartment building (named after the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev) down a wide boulevard to a monument of the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, where her grandmother lifted her up and tossed her into the air. The late 1980s were a difficult time in the Soviet Union, said Viazovska, now 37. “It took people many, many hours to buy even basic things.” When a shop was low on goods like butter or meat, her mother felt bad about taking more for her three children and worried that others waiting in the long line would get angry at her. Her family didn’t have much, because there wasn’t much to have, but her parents made sure she and her sisters never went hungry or without heat. No stores carried nice clothes, but workers were sometimes offered a chance to win a stylish pair of shoes made in Czechoslovakia as an incentive for doing good work. The shoes might not fit, her mother explained to her, but if you won a pair, you could trade with someone who had won a pair in your size.