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A WOMAN has won the maths world鈥檚 鈥淣obel prize鈥� for the first time. Maryam Mirzakhani of Stanford University received the Fields medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul, South Korea, on 13 August.
The medal is awarded once every four years to at most four people. All previous 52 Fields medallists, dating back to 1936, have been male.
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Mirzakhani studies 鈥渕oduli space鈥�, an entity that might be described as a universe in which every point is itself a universe. Her work describes new ways to navigate these spaces.
鈥淭his will lay to rest the often-quoted fact that a woman has never won,鈥� says Ingrid Daubechies, the president of the International Mathematics Union.
聯This will lay to rest the often-quoted fact that a woman has never won the Fields medal聰
The other three winners are Artur Avila at Denis Diderot University, Paris, who studies how systems evolve when constrained by certain rules; Manjul Bhargava, a number theorist at Princeton University (see 鈥�Insight from a Rubik鈥檚 cube鈥�); and Martin Hairer, who works on partial differential equations at the University of Warwick, UK.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淔irst female Fields鈥�