June Huh

Princeton University

June Huh is a Korean American mathematician and professor at Princeton University whose work forged deep and unexpected connections between algebraic geometry and combinatorics. Famously, he came to serious mathematics late, intending to become a poet before discovering the field as an undergraduate, and he went on to prove a series of long-open conjectures in combinatorics by importing tools from Hodge theory. His proof of the Heron–Rota–Welsh conjecture on the log-concavity of the characteristic polynomial of matroids, developed with Karim Adiprasito and Eric Katz, established a combinatorial analogue of the Hodge theory of projective varieties and reshaped the field. Huh was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022 together with a MacArthur Fellowship, and he previously held positions at the Institute for Advanced Study and Stanford University. His research is theoretical, with no patents or industry ties, positioning him as an academic figurehead for audiences building research-grade symbolic computation, combinatorial-optimization libraries, and tools that support pure-mathematics workflows in university settings.