Stanford professor is the first woman to win mathematics’ highest honor
Stanford mathematics Professor Maryam Mirzakhani investigates the geometry of abstract surfaces. Her work is pure mathematics, without immediately obvious application except for the inspiration it brings to students at Stanford and across the globe.
In 2014, Mirzakhani became the first woman to receive the International Mathematical Union’s Fields Medal, often called mathematics’ Nobel Prize. It is given every four years to a scholar or scholars under the age of 40 whose contributions significantly advance the field.
Mirzakhani was honored for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.
“My main interest is understanding structures you can put on a surface,” Mirzakhani explained in 2014. She investigates how the rules governing these abstract surfaces continue to hold true even as the surfaces become deformed. In so doing, she draws deep connections between disparate fields including algebraic geometry, dynamics and probability theory.
“What’s so special about Maryam, the thing that really separates her, is the originality in how she puts together these disparate pieces,” Stanford mathematics Professor and collaborator Steven Kerckhoff told the Stanford News Service in 2014.
“I like crossing the imaginary boundaries people set up between different fields — it’s very refreshing,” she told Quanta magazine.
In this video, Mirzakhani talks about her upbringing, the mathematics problems that intrigue her, and why she loves math.
Video courtesy of the Simons Foundation and the International Mathematical Union