Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win maths' Fields Medal, dies

Day 3,525, 09:40 Published in Iran Iran by ¤Anon.7904407¤


Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to receive the prestigious Fields Medal for mathematics, has died in the US.
The 40-year-old had breast cancer, which had spread to her bones.
Nicknamed the "Nobel Prize for Mathematics", the Fields Medal is only awarded every four years to between two and four mathematicians under 40.
It was given to Prof Mirzakhani, an Iranian, in 2014, for her work on complex geometry and dynamical systems.
"A light was turned off today. It breaks my heart... gone far too soon," her friend, Nasa scientist Firouz Naderi, posted on Instagram.
Born in 1977, Prof Mirzakhani was brought up in post-revolutionary Iran and won two gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad as a teenager.
She earned a PhD at Harvard University in 2004, and later a professorship at Stanford.
Her receipt of the Fields Medal three years ago ended a long wait for women in the mathematics community for the prize, first established in 1936.
Prof Mirzakhani was also the first Iranian to receive it.
At the time of the award, Jordan Ellenberg explained her research to a popular audience:
... [Her] work expertly blends dynamics with geometry. Among other things, she studies billiards. But now, in a move very characteristic of modern mathematics, it gets kind of meta: She considers not just one billiard table, but the universe of all possible billiard tables. And the kind of dynamics she studies doesn't directly concern the motion of the billiards on the table, but instead a transformation of the billiard table itself, which is changing its shape in a rule-governed way; if you like, the table itself moves like a strange planet around the universe of all possible tables ... This isn't the kind of thing you do to win at pool, but it's the kind of thing you do to win a Fields Medal. And it's what you need to do in order to expose the dynamics at the heart of geometry; for there's no question that they're there.
Prof Dame Frances Kirwan, a member of the medal selection committee from the University of Oxford, said at the time: "I hope that this award will inspire lots more girls and young women, in this country and around the world, to believe in their own abilities and aim to be the Fields Medallists of the future."
Sources:BBC - Wikipedia