A woman has won the maths world's "Nobel prize" for
the first time. Maryam Mirzakhani of Stanford University, California,
will receive the Fields medal tomorrow at the International Congress of
Mathematicians in Seoul, South Korea.
The medal is awarded once every four years
to at most four recipients, who must be aged under 40 at the start of
that year. All the previous 52 Fields medallists, dating back to 1936,
have been male.
Mirzakhani, who is Iranian, studies the
geometry of moduli space, a complex geometric and algebraic entity that
might be described as a universe in which every point is itself a
universe. Mirzakhani described the number of ways a beam of light can
travel a closed loop in a two-dimensional universe. To answer the
question, it turns out, you cannot just stay in your "home" universe –
you have to understand how to navigate the entire multiverse. Mirzakhani
has shown mathematicians new ways to navigate these spaces.
Mirzakhani first attracted international
attention as a high-school student in 1995, when she was the first
Iranian student to achieve a perfect score in the International
Mathematics Olympiad.
"She is very, very well known in Iran,
where she is held out as an example for younger students," says Ingrid
Daubechies, the president of the International Mathematical Union, which
selects the Fields medallists.
"Speaking as a woman myself,
it is a wonderful thing to see her win," Daubechies adds. "It will lay
to rest the often-quoted fact that a woman has never won." In future,
she says, the idea of a woman winning the top maths award will no longer
seem exceptional.
The three other winners are Brazilian-born
Artur Avila of Denis Diderot University in Paris, France, who studies
how chaotic systems evolve when constrained by certain rules; Manjul Bhargava,
a number theorist at Princeton University; and Martin Hairer, an expert
in partial differential equations at the University of Warwick, UK.
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