Three UT Mathematicians Featured at Leading International Conference
At the International Congress of Mathematics, The University of Texas at Austin was well represented.
Lisa Piccirillo, Maggie Miller and David Ben-Zvi are leading UT mathematicians who spoke at ICM 2026.
This summer, the United States was host to one of the world’s preeminent events, a spectacle that takes place only once every four years and that gathers thousands of participants from dozens of nations, celebrating some of the finest in human achievement.
That description matches not only the World Cup but also the world’s largest conference for mathematics, the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), at which three faculty from The University of Texas at Austin were invited to give expert overviews of their respective subfields, one of the highest honors for a mathematician.
The assembly in Philadelphia concluded this week as mathematicians reflected together on the state of their discipline and forecast where mathematics was headed.
UT math and engineering science alum Jalal Shatah (B.S. ’79) chaired ICM 2026, and members of the highly ranked UT Department of Mathematics were there to represent leading-edge mathematics.
David Ben-Zvi, a professor who holds the University Chair in Mathematics, surveyed one of the most exciting areas in mathematics, Lie Theory and the Langlands program, which unites previously distinct branches of mathematics and physics. Ben -Zvi’s work helps illuminate the fundamental connection between geometry, symmetries and numbers that physicists and mathematicians had sought for decades.
Maggie Miller, an assistant professor and Frank E. Gerth III Faculty Fellow, in 2022 solved a 40-year-old problem about distinguishing knotted surfaces in four dimensions. She earned a Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize and a place on the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science list because of it. She gave a section lecture on topology, the study of the generic features of objects as they stretch or bend but do not break.
So did Lisa Piccirillo, another Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize winner and professor of mathematics who holds the department’s Sid. W. Richardson Regents Chair. Piccirillo first made headlines in 2020 when, as a graduate student at UT, she unraveled a half-century-old question about the Conway knot after just a few nights of work. Piccirillo currently works to construct or rule out “exotic” 4-dimensional spaces to address a major gap in mathematicians’ understanding of topology.
