How Korean American mathematician June Huh went from high school dropout to Fields Medalist

"I was pretty good at most subjects except math," Huh, a Korean American mathematician and professor at Princeton University, said in a July 2022 interview with The New York Times after winning the Fields Medal, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics."

"Math was notably mediocre, on average, meaning on some tests I did reasonably OK. But other tests, I nearly failed."

Huh said he sometimes regrets that he did not focus on math earlier. "But at other times, it seems that very curvy road I went through was actually the optimal path, at least for me," he said in an interview with Princeton University in the U.S. the same year.

Born in 1983 in California, Huh moved to Seoul, South Korea, at the age of two, where his father taught statistics and his mother Russian language and literature. Despite his academic environment, he avoided mathematics whenever possible and struggled in structured classroom settings, preferring to study independently.

At 16, during his first year of high school, he dropped out to pursue poetry, drawn to its emotional and creative expression. "I could literally physically cry after listening to good music," he told Quanta Magazine. He wrote about nature and personal experiences but later found the process inward-looking and emotionally difficult. "I wanted to be someone who writes great poetry," he said. "I didn’t want to write great poetry."

He then returned to academic study and entered Seoul National University in 2002, initially majoring in astronomy and physics, but remained uncertain about his direction. He skipped classes frequently, retook courses, and described himself as "generally lost."

His turning point came in his sixth year, at age 23, when he attended a lecture by Japanese Fields Medalist Heisuke Hironaka, a visiting professor at Seoul National.

Huh was drawn to Hironaka’s teaching style and continued attending his lectures even as most students dropped out due to the difficulty. "He’s like a superstar in most of East Asia," he said of Hironaka.

Huh began spending more time with Hironaka outside class, including meeting for lunch to discuss mathematics.

"It was mostly him talking to me," Huh said. "And my goal was to pretend to understand something and react in the right way so that the conversation kept going. It was a challenging task because I really didn’t know what was going on."

Through these interactions, Huh began to see mathematics differently, viewing it as a way to explore objective beauty beyond personal expression, something he felt poetry could not offer.

After graduating, he pursued a master’s degree under Hironaka.

In 2009, Huh applied to about a dozen graduate schools in the U.S. to pursue a doctoral degree.

"I was fairly confident that despite all my failed math courses in my undergrad transcript, I had an enthusiastic letter from a Fields Medalist, so I would be accepted from many, many grad schools."

Instead, all but one rejected him. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign placed him on a waiting list before eventually offering him admission.

He began his graduate studies there before transferring to the University of Michigan in 2011 to complete his doctorate.

Becoming a Fields Medalist

In 2012, while still a Ph.D. student, he published a paper solving "Read's conjecture," a partial problem of the long-standing "Rota's conjecture," gaining recognition in the mathematics community.

He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 2014. That same year, he solved a series of major mathematical problems, including the "Mason-Welsh conjecture," the "Dimca-Papadima conjecture," and "Hoggar's conjecture." In 2018, Huh also solved Rota's conjecture, further strengthening his reputation in the field.

His work earned him the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2017, and he was invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. He received the Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Science for physics and mathematics in 2021.

He later served as a professor at Stanford University in the U.S. from 2020 to 2021 and has been a professor at Princeton University and a distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study since 2021.

June Huh, 2022 Fields Medalist. Photo courtesy of Princeton University, U.S.

At the 2022 International Mathematical Union (IMU) award ceremony held at Aalto University in Helsinki, Huh became the first scholar of Korean descent to receive the Fields Medal, according to The Korea Times.

The IMU cited his contributions, noting that "using methods of Hodge theory, tropical geometry and singularity theory, June Huh, with his collaborators, has transformed the field of geometric combinatorics."

Reflecting on the moment, Huh described the recognition as "strange, overwhelming and weird."

"I feel a sense of weight when seeing the list of previous winners," he said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency. "There are even names of those who I consider heroes for making great contributions in the field of algebraic geometry, which I am researching."

Colleagues have linked his mathematical approach to his artistic background. Federico Ardila-Mantilla, a mathematician at San Francisco State University, said Huh’s work reflects a strong sense of aesthetic judgment.

"Mathematicians are a lot like artists in that really we’re looking for beauty," Ardila-Mantilla told Quanta Magazine. "But I think in his case, it’s really pronounced. And I just really like his taste. He makes beautiful things."

Huh himself has drawn parallels between mathematics and art, describing both as processes of discovering something that already exists rather than inventing it. For him, mathematics became a way to express intuition through shared language. He said the work often begins with a sense that something is true, even when there are no words yet to describe it.

In a 2025 interview with Korea news site DongA Science, he said winning Fields Medal can make it "hard to be free." "When you become aware that 'others see me this way,' you tend to act accordingly, don't you?"

Despite the expectations, he said he continues to approach mathematics as he always has, focusing on building connections across fields and developing new ways to express complex ideas. He sees a common thread linking poetry, art, and mathematics: all begin with an idea that cannot yet be expressed. The challenge, he said, is to create a language that makes that idea shareable, a process he believes is best done collaboratively.

Asked whether he would return to poetry, Huh was uncertain. "Maybe. But I don’t know," he said. "I’m very much into something else."