Maryam Mirzakhani became the first Muslim, the first woman and the first Iranian honoured with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics. The award committee cited her work in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces. Her research topics include Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. Dr. Maryam was born in Tehran, Iran in 1977 and is working as a Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University in the USA since, 2008.
The Fields Medal is officially known as International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics. It is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians once in four years on the occasion of the International Congress of Mathematicians to recognise outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement. A candidate’s 40th birthday must not occur before January 1st of the year of the Congress at which the Fields Medals are awarded. This requirement makes the prize very difficult to win.
This year the awards were announced during the International Congress of Mathematics at Seoul, Korea in August. The Fields Medal Committee is chosen by the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and is normally chaired by the IMU President. It is asked to choose at least two, with a strong preference for four, Fields Medalists, and to have regard in its choice to representing a diversity of mathematical fields. The name of the Chair of the Committee is made public, but the names of other members of the Committee remain anonymous until the award of the prize at the Congress. If a former student (Ph.D. thesis only) of a Committee member is seriously considered, such a member shall not continue to serve on the Committee for its final decision.
The Fields Medal (back): In the background there is a representation of Archimedes’ sphere being inscribed in a cylinder. The inscription reads: Congregati ex toto orbe mathematici ob scripta insignia tribuere (the mathematicians having congregated from the whole world awarded this medal because of outstanding writings).
Unlike the Nobel Prize, the award money of US$13,700 is appreciably less. The three Co-winners are: Artur Avila from Brazil; he is the first South American to receive the Fields Medal; Martin Hairer is from Australia; Manjul Bhargava is now settled in Canada and is of Indian Origin.
As a young girl, Maryam dreamed of becoming a writer. By high school, however, her affinity for solving mathematical problems and working on proofs had shifted her sights. Maryam became known to the international math scene as a teenager, winning gold medals at International Math Olympiads held in Hong Kong (1994) and Toronto (1995). In the Toronto Olympiad, she finished with a perfect score. In February 1998, a bus bringing the mathematical elite of Tehran’s Sharif University back from a competition in the western city of Ahwaz skidded out of control and crashed into a ravine. Seven award-winning mathematicians and two drivers lost their lives in the crash. One of the survivors was Maryam Mirzakhani!
After earning her bachelor’s degree from Sharif University of Technology in 1999, she began work on her doctorate at Harvard University under the guidance of the 1998 Fields Medalist, Curtis McMullen. She obtained PhD in 2004. From 2004 to 2008, Maryam was a Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellow and an assistant Professor at Princeton University. She is now a professor at Stanford University. Experts say that her achievements “combine superb problem-solving ability, ambitious mathematical vision and fluency in many disciplines, which is unusual in the modern era, when considerable specialization is often required to reach the frontier”.
Her honours include the 2009 Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics and the 2013 Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society.
[SAMEEN AHMED KHAN is on the Engineering Department, Salalah College of Technology (SCOT), Salalah, Oman. [email protected]]