A woman has won the world’s most prestigious mathematics prize for the first time since the award was established nearly 80 years ago.

Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University in California, was named the first female winner of the Fields Medal – often described as the Nobel prize for mathematics – at a ceremony in Seoul on Wednesday morning.

The prize, worth 15,000 Canadian dollars, is awarded to exceptional talents under the age of 40 once every four years by the International Mathematical Union. Between two and four prizes are announced each time.

Three other researchers were named Fields Medal winners at the same ceremony in South Korea. They included Martin Hairer, a 38-year-old Austrian based at Warwick University in the UK; Manjul Bhargava, a 40-year old Canadian-American at Princeton University in the US and Artur Avila, 35, a Brazilian-French researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of Jussieu in Paris.

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Considering the general antagonism between Iran and the West, I find it surprising the number of Iranians, like this woman, who reside in the West and seem to fit in perfectly well, often in highly skilled jobs. I have had dealings with a few of them in the engineering area and they strike me as quite nice people.

> Most of the problems Mirzakhani works on involve geometric structures on surfaces and their deformations. She has a particular interest in hyperbolic planes, which can look like the edges of curly kale leaves, but may be easier to crochet than explain. According to a citation released by the International Mathematical Union, Mirzakhani won the prize for her “outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”.

So, what’s so difficult about hyperbolic planes and moduli spaces? That work is over a hundred years old.

mollwollfumble said:

> Most of the problems Mirzakhani works on involve geometric structures on surfaces and their deformations. She has a particular interest in hyperbolic planes, which can look like the edges of curly kale leaves, but may be easier to crochet than explain. According to a citation released by the International Mathematical Union, Mirzakhani won the prize for her “outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”.

So, what’s so difficult about hyperbolic planes and moduli spaces? That work is over a hundred years old.

ROFL

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/13/field-medals-2014-prizes-maths-work-few-grasp