Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani yesterday became the first woman to receive a Fields Medal, often considered mathematics’ equivalent of the Nobel Prize and given every four years.
Several Fields Medals can be awarded at once and Mirzakhani, a professor at Stanford University in California, was one of four winners honored at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul yesterday.
The other recipients were Artur Avila of Brazil’s National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics and France’s National Center for Scientific Research; Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University; and Martin Hairer of the University of Warwick in England.
Photo: EPA
The 52 medalists from previous years have all been men.
“This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians,” Mirzakhani was quoted as saying in a Stanford news release. “I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years.”
Much of the research by Mirzakhani, who was born in Tehran in 1977, involves the behavior of dynamical systems, many of which have no exact mathematical solutions, even simple ones.
“What Maryam discovered is that in another regime, the dynamical orbits are tightly constrained to follow algebraic laws,” said Curtis McMullen, a Harvard University professor who was Mirzakhani’s doctoral adviser. “These dynamical systems describe surfaces with many handles, like pretzels, whose shape is evolving over time by twisting and stretching in a precise way. They are related to billiards on tables that are not rectangular, but still polygonal, like the regular octagon.”
In an e-mail Ingrid Daubechies, a professor of mathematics at Duke University in North Carolina and president of the International Mathematical Union said: “I bet the vast majority of the mathematicians in the world will be happy that it will no longer be possible to say that ‘the Fields Medal has always been awarded only to men.’”
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