A US-based Iranian mathematician has won the prestigious Fields Medal, becoming the first ever female laureate of the most prestigious honor in mathematics.
Prof Maryam Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal in recognition of her contributions to the understanding of the symmetry of curved surfaces.
She was among four outstanding mathematicians who were presented the award Wednesday at the opening ceremony of the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians, held in South Korean capital Seoul.
Incidentally, the presenter of the award was Park Geun-Hye, South Korea's first woman president.
The other laureates are Prof. Manjul Barghava, a Canadian-American of Indian origin; Artur Avila, a naturalized French citizen born in Brazil; and Austrian Martin Hairer, a Professor at the University of Warwick, UK.
They get Canadian$15,000 as cash prize.
With no Nobel prize given for mathematics, the Fields Medal is widely regarded as the world's highest award for the discipline.
The Fields Medal is given by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) once every four years to young mathematicians who have made major contributions to the field of mathematics and who hold promises for future achievements.
It was the first in a series of awards IMU instituted. The award is named after Canadian mathematician John Fields, who established it in 1936.
The winners of the Nevanlinna Prize, the Gauss Prize, and the Chern Medal Award were also honored at the Seoul ceremony. In addition, the winner of the Leelavati Prize and the speaker of the ICM Emmy Noether Lecture were announced.
The IMU award committee said Maryam Mirzakhani has made stunning advances in the theory of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces, leading the way to new frontiers in this area. Her insights have integrated methods from diverse fields, such as algebraic geometry, topology and probability theory. She has gained widespread recognition for her early results in hyperbolic geometry, and her most recent work constitutes a major advance in dynamical systems.
Born in 1977 in Iran's capital Tehran, Mirzakhani found international recognition as a brilliant teenager after receiving gold medals at two consecutive International Mathematical Olympiads. She was a Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellow and an assistant professor at Princeton University. She is currently a professor at Stanford University. She has also won the 2009 Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics and the 2013 Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society.
The 37-year-old mathematician said she will be happy if her award encourages young female scientists and mathematicians. Mirzakhani feels certain that there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years.
Born and raised in Tehran, Mirzakhani is currently living in California with her husband and three-year-old daughter.
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