MOSCOW, August 13 (RIA Novosti) — Iranian Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman in history to be awarded a Fields Medal, also known as “the mathematician’s Nobel Prize” for her work on complex geometry, New York Times reports.
Maryam Mirzakhani was born in Tehran in 1977 and is currently a professor at Stanford. The medal was presented to her in recognition of her “sophisticated and highly original contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces, such as spheres, the surfaces of doughnuts and of hyperbolic objects,” according to the Stanford University’s official website.
All of the 52 mathematicians who received that award before her were men. Artur Avila of the National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Brazil and the National Center for Scientific Research in France; Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University; and Martin Hairer of the University of Warwick in England were also awarded the medal alongside her.
“All researchers in mathematics will tell you that there is no difference between the math done by a woman or a man, and of course the decision of the Fields Medal committee is based only on the results of each candidate,” said Ingrid Daubechies, a professor of mathematics at Duke and president of the International Mathematical Union, according to The New York Times. “That 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.’ ”
The Fields Medal was conceived by a Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields and is awarded to one or several mathematicians not over 40 years of age at each International Congress of the International Mathematical Union which takes place every 4 years. It is often considered the highest honor a mathematician can attain.
