AFP

Emergency services at the scene of a deadly avalanche in the Italian Dolomites recovered what body parts they could on Tuesday, with the dangers of venturing under the partially collapsed glacier slowing the search.

Rescue teams sent helicopters and drones up for a second day after Sunday’s disaster, which saw at least seven hikers killed when a section of the country’s largest Alpine glacier gave way, sending ice and rock hurtling down the mountain.

Italy has blamed the collapse on climate change and fears more of the glacier could come crashing down have prevented access to much of the area where hikers, some roped together, are believed to be buried.

Authorities had declared 14 people missing but revised that number down to five on Tuesday, after managing to trace some of those unaccounted for.

They had stressed from the start that the exact number of climbers at the scene when the avalanche hit was unknown.

“Operations on the ground will only be carried out to recover any remains discovered by the drones, to ensure rescuers’ safety,” the Trentino Alpine Rescue Service said Tuesday.

Experts were surveying the area to determine how best to enable teams with sniffer dogs to get out onto the site safely on Wednesday or Thursday, the Service’s national chief Maurizio Dellantonio told AGI news agency.

Relatives of people reported missing gathered at the town of Canazei, where recovered remains were placed in a make-shift morgue at a gymnasium.

“The important finds, not just bones, are first photographed, then recovered and put onto a helicopter” and flown to Canazei to be “catalogued and placed in cold storage”, Dellantonio said.

Such finds were “bones that have not been flayed, a piece of hand with a ring, tattoos, anything that can enable a person to be identified”, including shoes, backpacks and ice-picks.

– Still hope for survivors –

Helicopter pilot Fausto Zambelli told journalists some belongings had been spotted from the air, but it was not yet clear “if that means there are victims there, or if they belong to old hiking expeditions”.

He said hope of finding survivors under the ice was slim, but not entirely gone.

“If there are ‘pockets’ (of air), there’s still hope. Time is obviously short, but we still hope to find someone alive”.

The disaster struck one day after a record-high temperature of 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded at the summit of Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Italian Dolomites.

Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella said the collapse was “symbolic of the many tragedies that ungoverned climate change is causing in so many parts of the world”.

One of the bodies recovered belonged to a Czech who was travelling with a friend now registered as missing, the Czech foreign ministry told AFP.

The Trento public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation to determine the causes of the tragedy.

The glacier, nicknamed “queen of the Dolomites”, feeds the Avisio river and overlooks Lake Fedaia in the autonomous Italian province of Trento.

According to a March report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), melting ice and snow is one of 10 major threats caused by global warming, disrupting ecosystems and infrastructure.

Ukrainian maths professor Maryna Viazovska, who on Tuesday won the top mathematics prize, the Fields Medal, said her life “changed forever” when Russia invaded her home country.

The 37-year-old’s parents and sisters were living in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, when the war began in February.

“I could not think of anything else, including mathematics,” she in a video as she received the prize at a ceremony in Helsinki. 

Her sisters — along with her young nephew and niece — were evacuated from Kyiv and are now staying with her in Switzerland, where she works at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne.

Viazovska and three other mathematicians received the Fields Medal, dubbed the Nobel prize in maths, in Helsinki after the ceremony was moved from Saint Petersburg to the Finnish capital in response to Moscow’s war.

She is only the second woman to receive the award, which is awarded to mathematicians under 40, since it was created in 1936. 

The other female laureate, Iran’s Maryam Mirzakhani, died of breast cancer in 2017 just three years after winning the prize.

– ‘Terrible war’ –

Viazovska was born in 1984 in Kyiv, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.

In Ukraine, she studied at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, before earning a masters degree at Germany’s University of Kaiserslautern and a PhD at the University of Bonn.

Since 2018, she has been chair of number theory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Her husband Daniil Evtushinsky is a physicist at the Swiss institute.

In the first days of the war, teaching maths to students “helped me to forget about this fear and pain inside myself”, she said.

At the ceremony she paid tribute to Yulia Zdanovska, a 21-year-old mathematician who was killed by a Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in March.

“Yulia was a person filled with light and her big dream was teaching mathematics to kids in Ukraine,” Viazovska said.

“When young people die you think, ‘What is the point of my work as a teacher if young, talented people are just wasted in this terrible war?'”

– 13 years to find ‘magic formula’ –

She won the Fields Medal for her work on sphere packing, which has plagued mathematicians for hundreds of years.

It fundamentally involves how to put spheres in a container in the most compact way. 

According to legend, it was first a question of how many cannonballs could be packed into a ship, Viazovska said.

After hundreds of years, mathematicians had solved the problem in three dimensions, which involved stacking them in a pyramid, like oranges at a supermarket.

But expanding the theory out into other dimensions — possible in mathematics — had proved elusive.

Viazovska however worked on the problem from 2003 to 2016 and found a “magic formula” that solved the problem in dimensions eight and 24, she said.

“Maryna pulled off something really miraculous here,” mathematician Henry Cohn of MIT told the ceremony. “As soon as this paper became available, everyone was astonished by it.”

Philippe Moustrou of France’s Toulouse University told AFP that it was “not as if she found something that was just waiting to be discovered — she found the extra ingredient”.

But Viazovska’s thoughts remain with the war — and the hopeful return of a peace she once took for granted.

“The thing I like about Kyiv the most are the green parks, the quiet places and the ancient churches. I understand that now there will be marks of war there and this is a scary thought,” she said.

“But Kyiv is one of the eternal cities. One day soon, I hope to return.”

Ukraine’s Maryna Viazovska paid tribute to those suffering in her war-torn country on Tuesday as she became the second woman to be awarded the Fields medal, known as the Nobel prize for mathematics.

Viazovska, a 37-year-old Kyiv-born math professor, received the prestigious award alongside three other winners at a ceremony in Helsinki.

“My life changed forever” when Moscow invaded Ukraine in February, she said in a video displayed at the ceremony, adding that her sisters had been evacuated from Kyiv.

“Right now Ukrainians are really paying the highest price for our beliefs and our freedom,” she said.

The International Congress of Mathematicians, where the prize is awarded, was initially scheduled to be held in Russia’s second city Saint Petersburg — and opened by President Vladimir Putin.

Earlier in the year hundreds of mathematicians signed an open letter protesting the choice of the host city, and after Moscow invaded Ukraine in late February the event was moved to the Finnish capital.

The other Fields winners were France’s Hugo Duminil-Copin of the University of Geneva, Britain’s James Maynard of Oxford University and June Huh of Princeton in the United States.

The medal, along with $15,000 Canadian dollars ($11,600), is awarded every four years to between two to four candidates under the age of 40 for “outstanding mathematical achievement”.

– ‘Tour de force’ – 

Viazovska was born in 1984 in Ukraine, then still part of the Soviet Union, and has been a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland since 2017.

At the ceremony she paid tribute to Yulia Zdanovska, a young mathematician who studied under the same teachers she had in Kyiv, who was killed by a Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in March.

“Yulia was a person filled with light, and her big dream was teaching mathematics to kids in Ukraine,” Viazovska said.

“When someone like her dies, it’s like the future dies.”

In a decision made before the war in Ukraine began, Viazovska was awarded for her work in sphere packing — a problem first posed by German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler nearly 400 years ago.

In what is called the Kepler conjecture, he proposed that the most compact way to pack spheres was in a pyramid, like oranges at a supermarket.

But it was such a complex problem that it was not considered proved correct until 1998 via intense computer number-crunching.

Then in 2016, Viazovska solved the problem in the eighth dimension, using what is called an E8 lattice.

Marcus du Sautoy, a British mathematics professor at Oxford University, told AFP it was a surprise when Viazovska came up with such “slick proof” compared to the “tortuous proof needed in three dimensions”.

Renaud Coulangeon of Bordeaux University told AFP the solution was a “tour de force”.

The only previous female laureate in the prize’s more than 80-year history was Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who died of breast cancer in 2017 just three years after winning the award.

Du Sautoy said he hopes Viazovska’s win “will contribute to inspiring more women to choose mathematics as a career.”

– ‘Express the inexpressible’ –

Duminil-Copin, born in France in 1985, is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, focusing on the mathematical branch of statistical physics.

He was honoured for solving “long-standing problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions”, which, according to the jury, has opened up several new research directions.

Maynard, 35, received the medal “for contributions to analytic number theory, which have led to major advances in the understanding in the structure of prime numbers,” Kenig said.

“His work is highly ingenious, often leading to surprising breakthroughs on important problems that seemed to be inaccessible by current techniques,” the International Mathematical Union said in a statement.

June Huh, 39, was given the award for “transforming” the field of geometric combinatorics, “using methods of Hodge theory, tropical geometry and singularity theory”, the jury said.

He is a rare Fields winner who did not focus on mathematics in his teen years, after a bad elementary school test score convinced him he didn’t have a talent for it, he told Quanta Magazine.

“When I was young, math was like a faraway land, surrounded by giant walls that I could not climb,” Huh said in his video.

“I grew up in Korea and I dreamed of becoming a poet, to express the inexpressible. I eventually learned that mathematics is a way of doing that.”

Emergency services at the scene of a deadly avalanche in the Italian Dolomites recovered what body parts they could on Tuesday, with the dangers of venturing under the partially collapsed glacier slowing the search.

Rescue teams sent helicopters and drones up for a second day after Sunday’s disaster, which saw at least seven hikers killed when a section of the country’s largest Alpine glacier gave way, sending ice and rock hurtling down the mountain.

Italy has blamed the collapse on climate change and fears more of the glacier could come crashing down have prevented access to much of the area where hikers, some roped together, are believed to be buried.

Authorities have declared 14 missing but stressed the exact number of climbers at the scene when the avalanche hit was unknown.

“Operations on the ground will only be carried out to recover any remains discovered by the drones, to ensure rescuers’ safety,” the Trentino Alpine Rescue Service said Tuesday.

Experts were surveying the area to determine how best to enable teams with sniffer dogs to get out onto the site safely on Wednesday or Thursday, the Service’s national chief Maurizio Dellantonio told AGI news agency.

Relatives of people reported missing gathered at the town of Canazei, where recovered remains were placed in a make-shift morgue at a gymnasium.

“The important finds, not just bones, are first photographed, then recovered and put onto a helicopter” and flown to Canazei to be “catalogued and placed in cold storage”, Dellantonio said.

Such finds were “bones that have not been flayed, a piece of hand with a ring, tattoos, anything that can enable a person to be identified”, including shoes, backpacks and ice-picks.

– Last selfie –

The disaster struck one day after a record-high temperature of 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded at the summit of Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Italian Dolomites.

Prime Minister Mario Draghi said Monday the collapse was certainly “linked to the deterioration of the environment and the climate situation”.

One of the bodies recovered belonged to a Czech who was travelling with a friend now registered as missing, the Czech foreign ministry told AFP.

Also missing, according to Italian media reports, was Filippo Bari, 27, who had snapped a grinning selfie of himself on the mountain earlier Sunday and sent it to family and friends saying “look where I am!”

Bari, who has a four-year old son, has not responded to repeated attempts to contact him, nor have the five friends he was believed to be hiking with, the Corriere della Sera said.

The Trento public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation to determine the causes of the tragedy.

The glacier, nicknamed “queen of the Dolomites”, feeds the Avisio river and overlooks Lake Fedaia in the autonomous Italian province of Trento.

According to a March report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), melting ice and snow is one of 10 major threats caused by global warming, disrupting ecosystems and infrastructure.