Woman Wins Top Math Award
The latest and hottest math news is that the Fields Medal – generally considered to be the Nobel Prize of mathematics – was recently awarded for the first time in its nearly 80-year history to a woman – 37-year-old, Iranian-born Maryam Mirzakhani of Stanford. About this prestigious honor (the Nobel equivalent in the field of Mathematics), Maryam said, “This is a great honour. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians.” She added, “I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years”…”It is fun – it’s like solving a puzzle or connecting the dots in a detective case,” she said. “I felt that this was something I could do, and I wanted to pursue this path.”
Maryam Mirzakhani has made striking and highly original contributions to geometry and dynamical systems. Her work on Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces bridges several mathematical disciplines – hyperbolic geometry, complex analysis, topology, and dynamics – and influences them all in return. She gained widespread recognition for her early results in hyperbolic geometry, and her most recent work constitutes a major advance in dynamical systems.” Read more about Maryam’s research into the Geometry of curved surfaces here.