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Another glass ceiling broken - hopefully permanently


imatfaal

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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 was recognised for her work on complex geometry. Four of the medals were presented in Seoul at the International Congress of Mathematicians, held every four years.

Taken from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28739373

 

All four winners of this Congress' awards

 

Citation:

 

Maryam Mirzakhani has made stunning advances in the theory of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces, and led the way to new frontiers in this area. Her insights have integrated methods from diverse fields, such as algebraic geometry, topology and probability theory.

 

In hyperbolic geometry, Mirzakhani established asymptotic formulas and statistics for the number of simple closed geodesics on a Riemann surface of genus g. She next used these results to give a new and completely unexpected proof of Witten’s conjecture, a formula for characteristic classes for the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces with marked points.

 

In dynamics, she found a remarkable new construction that bridges the holomorphic and symplectic aspects of moduli space, and used it to show that Thurston’s earthquake flow is ergodic and mixing.

 

Most recently, in the complex realm, Mirzakhani and her coworkers produced the long sought-after proof of the conjecture that – while the closure of a real geodesic in moduli space can be a fractal cobweb, defying classification – the closure of a complex geodesic is always an algebraic subvariety.

 

Her work has revealed that the rigidity theory of homogeneous spaces (developed by Margulis, Ratner and others) has a definite resonance in the highly inhomogeneous, but equally fundamental realm of moduli spaces, where many developments are still unfolding.

Press Release from IMU

Edited by imatfaal
to put in the correct citation
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Wow,

 

Lots of unique perspectives and lines of research. Hope she and here Iranian research team can broaden their cloistered horizons (if not already doing so) to exchange ideas with other fundamental research teams from all over the world.

 

Hope we hear of more successes from her and her Iranian team in the future concerning her mathematical research and its possible applications.

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Hope she and here Iranian research team ...

Does she collaborate with many other Iranians? Maybe she does, but I would not take that for granted as she is now based at Stanford. One would have to check her publication list carefully: in this respect I could not find much on the arXiv, but not everyone posts everything there.

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Does she collaborate with many other Iranians? Maybe she does, but I would not take that for granted as she is now based at Stanford. One would have to check her publication list carefully: in this respect I could not find much on the arXiv, but not everyone posts everything there.

 

Yeah, you are probably right. She may have no desire to collaborate more with Iranians than any other nationality or group now that she's here. Maybe only because she is still an Iranian citizen.

Edited by pantheory
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