The International Congress of Mathematicians, ICM, is the largest and most prestigious conference for the topic of mathematics. At the next occasion, in Philadelphia on July 23–30, 2026, David Witt Nyström has been invited to give a presentation in the geometry section of the conference.
ICM was first held in 1897 and is thus one of the oldest still active scientific congresses in the world. It is held every four years, and is the occasion when Fields Medals and many other prestigious prizes are awarded. To be invited to speak at ICM has been called “the equivalent … of an induction to a hall of fame” and at each of the latest five congresses, one or two Swedish matematicians have been invited.
David Witt Nyström is a professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Division of Algebra and Geometry. He obtained his PhD at the University of Gothenburg and was a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge for two years before returning. David has received several awards and grants, as the Wallenberg Prize in mathematics and the Göran Gustafsson Prize, and last year a Frontiers of Science Award. Recently he received funding through the Knut and Alice Wallenberg’s Mathematics Programme.
David’s area of research is complex geometry. He has a special interest in Okounkov bodies, geodesics in spaces of Kähler metrics, volumes of big cohomology classes and Hele-Shaw flows, and a recent focus of his is non-Archimedean Kähler geometry. “It is of course a great honour to be invited, not least when you think of all great names who have spoken at the congress over the years. At first I actually suspected that my invitation was an advanced scam… I look forward to sharing about some of the progress we have made in my research field, and I also look forward to meeting many old and new friends.”
This is the third congress in a row that a professor from the Department of Mathematical Sciences has been invited to speak, and one can actually speak of three generations: in 2018 Bo Berndtsson was invited, in 2022 Robert Berman, who had Bo as his supervisor during his doctoral studies, was invited, and David in turn had Robert as his main supervisor.
International Congress of Mathematicians 2026
Read more about David’s research in A great challenge in complex geometry from March 2025 and hear about it in an episode of the interview series Meet the Mathematician from the autumn of 2024 (in Swedish, text in English).
Previous presentations from ICM can be listened to here:
Bo Berndtsson, Complex Brunn–Minkowski theory and positivity of vector bundles
Robert Berman, Emergent complex geometry and the gauge/gravity duality
- Full Professor, Algebra and Geometry, Mathematical Sciences