The Fields medal is the most prestigious award for mathematics and was first awarded in 1936. For 2014, four winners were announced this week and Maryam Mirzahkani, Professor of Mathematics at Stanford, becomes the first woman ever to be awarded a Fields medal.
Though women are generally underrepresented in mathematics – I suspect partly because of a lack of interest and partly because it is not a “politically correct” occupation – there have been many prominent female mathematicians. But this is the first time in the almost 80 years since it was established that a woman has won the Fields medal.
The Fields Medal is awarded every four years on the occasion of the International Congress of Mathematicians to recognize outstanding mathematical achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement.
The Fields Medal Committee is chosen by the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union and is normally chaired by the IMU President. It is asked to choose at least two, with a strong preference for four, Fields Medallists, and to have regard in its choice to representing a diversity of mathematical fields. A candidate’s 40th birthday must not occur before January 1st of the year of the Congress at which the Fields Medals are awarded.
Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University in California, was named the first female winner of the Fields Medal – often described as the Nobel prize for mathematics – at a ceremony in Seoul on Wednesday morning.
The prize, worth 15,000 Canadian dollars, is awarded to exceptional talents under the age of 40 once every four years by the International Mathematical Union. Between two and four prizes are announced each time.
Three other researchers were named Fields Medal winners at the same ceremony in South Korea. They included Martin Hairer, a 38-year-old Austrian based at Warwick University in the UK; Manjul Bhargava, a 40-year old Canadian-American at Princeton University in the US and Artur Avila, 35, a Brazilian-French researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of Jussieu in Paris.
There have been 55 Fields medallists since the prize was first awarded in 1936, including this year’s winners. The Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman refused the prize in 2006 for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture.
The citations for the four winners:
- Fields Medal 2014 for Artur Avila
- Fields Medal 2014 for Manjul Bhargava
- Fields Medal 2014 for Martin Hairer
- Fields Medal 2014 for Maryam Mirzakhani
Tags: Artur Avila, Fields Medal 2014, Manjul Bhargava, Martin Hairer, Maryam Mirzakhani
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