Maxim Kontsevich, born August 25, 1964, in Khimki, Russia, is a Russian-French mathematician and mathematical physicist. He won the Fields Medal in 1998 for proving Witten's conjecture on moduli spaces of curves, creating the Kontsevich integral for knot invariants, and his work on deformation quantization of Poisson manifolds. His ideas on homological mirror symmetry have also been hugely influential, blending string theory concepts with algebraic geometry. He's a professor at IHÉS in France and the University of Miami. Kontsevich's career reminds us how crossing boundaries between math and physics can lead to profound discoveries. How do you think proving Witten’s conjecture early on shaped the direction of his later work on quantization and mirror symmetry?