The Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani , a professor at Californian University of Stanford, 37, has become the first woman to receive the Fields medal, considered the Nobel Prize in mathematics, “for her outstanding advances in Riemann surfaces and their modular spaces “.
He shares the award with three other researchers , including the French-Brazilian Artur Avila, who is the first Latin American to achieve it. The four winners of the 2014 Fields medal, whose financial endowment is modest – about 10,000 euros – compared to the Nobel Prize awarded by the Swedish Academy, have been announced at the International Congress of Mathematics (CIM), which brings together in Seoul (Korea ) from August 13 to 21 to 5,000 mathematicians from around the world.
The Fields Medal was established in 1936 and is awarded every four years during the CIM celebration. Reward up to four mathematicians under the age of 40 for their outstanding discoveries.
With this decision, to give the award to the Iranian researcher Maryam Mirzakhani, not only a gender taboo is broken but also a geographical obstacle, since she is the first person from Iran to obtain the award. According to Ingrid Daubechies, current president of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), “this is very great news.
Women are still not sufficiently present in mathematical research, and Mirzakhani is a model to attract more women to the top positions ” . Manuel de León, director of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (ICMAT), agrees that it is “a milestone in the history of mathematics and means breaking decades of taboos.”
Another of the winners, the French-Brazilian Artur Avila , from the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu-Paris Rive Gauche (CNRS, France) and the National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA, Brazil), represents the first Latin American to obtain the medal and the first to have a doctorate outside of Europe or the US.
The 35-year-old researcher has been chosen for “his profound contributions to the theory of dynamical systems, which have changed the face of this field, using the powerful idea of renormalization as a unifying principle.” The other two winners are Professors Manjul Bhargava from Princeton University (USA), who has developed “powerful new methods in number geometry”, and Martin Hairer from the University of Warwick (UK), an expert on “ stochastic partial differential equations ”.
