Viazovska was born in Kyiv, the oldest of three sisters. Her father was a chemist who worked at the Antonov aircraft factory and her mother was an engineer. [ 6 ] She attended a specialized secondary school for high-achieving students in science and technology, Kyiv Natural Science Lyceum No. 145. An influential teacher there, Andrii Knyazyuk, had previously worked as a professional research mathematician before becoming a secondary school teacher. [ 7 ] Viazovska competed in domestic mathematics Olympiads when she was at high school, placing 13th in a national competition where 12 students were selected to a training camp before a six-member team for the International Mathematical Olympiad was chosen. [ 6 ] As a student at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, she competed at the International Mathematics Competition for University Students in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005, and was one of the first-place winners in 2002 and 2005. [ 8 ] She co-authored her first research paper in 2005. [ 6 ]
Viazovska earned a master’s from the University of Kaiserslautern in 2007, PhD from the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2010, [ 2 ] and a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Bonn in 2013. Her doctoral dissertation, Modular Functions and Special Cycles, concerns analytic number theory and was supervised by Don Zagier and Werner Müller. [ 9 ]
She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Mathematical School and the Humboldt University of Berlin [ 10 ] and a Minerva Distinguished Visitor [ 11 ] at Princeton University. Since January 2018 she has held the Chair of Number Theory as a full professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland after a short stint as tenure-track assistant professor. [ 4 ] .
