The IFF salutes Maryam Mirzakhani, who has just been awarded the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of mathematics. The first woman to win the prize, Mirzakhani was granted this honor for her contributions in the fields of dynamical systems and geometry, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces such as donuts and hyperbolic planes - which, as the Guardian noted today, may be easier to crochet than to explain. Born and raised in Tehran, Mirzakhani is now a mathematician at Stanford who first came to prominence as a teenager by winning gold medals at the 1994 and 1995 International Math Olympiads. Her achievement is not only a source of joy and pride for women everywhere, it is a reminder to us all of the thousand year long tradition of Persian math and science. At a time when there is so much demonization of Iran, what could be a more beautiful reminder of the intellectual greatness inherent in this culture. Of her highly original approach to problem solving Mirzakhani says: It is like being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some luck you might find a way out.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 05:09:39 +0000
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