An Iranian mathematician working in the US has become the first ever female winner of the celebrated Fields Medal. In a landmark hailed as "long overdue", Prof Maryam Mirzakhani, 37, was recognised for her work on complex geometry.
Prof Mirzakhani's winning work relates to convoluted mathematical constructions called Riemann surfaces.
In becoming the very first female medallist, Prof Mirzakhani - who
teaches at Stanford University in California - ends what has been a long
wait for the mathematics community.
Prof Mirzakhani's seminal research concerns shapes called Riemann
surfaces. These are convoluted mathematical objects that can be analysed
using complex numbers - i.e. numbers with real and imaginary parts.
In particular, she has studied "moduli spaces" of these shapes, which map
all of the possible geometries of a Riemann surface into their own, new
space.
She went to school and university in Tehran before doing a PhD at Harvard
Prof Alison Etheridge, a lecturer in applied mathematics at the University of Oxford, said she was thrilled by the announcement.
No comments:
Post a Comment