Our colleague Daniele Semola has been awarded a 2025 Frontiers of Science Award for his breakthrough paper Fundamental groups and the Milnor conjecture with Elia Bruè and Aaron Naber at the International Congress of Basic Science.

A leisurely account of the history of the so-called Milnor conjecture on the size of the fundamental group of complete Riemannian manifolds with non-negative Ricci curvature by Jordana Cepelewicz has recently appeared in Quanta Magazine. In their award-winning paper, Daniele and his co-authors construct counterexamples to this famous conjecture, which had stood since 1968, in dimensions seven and higher. A key step in their construction is to realise a «smooth version of the fractal snowflake» in these dimensions, as they explain in their paper.