Maryam Mirzakhani is a 37-year-old Iranian who has been a professor at Stanford University since 2008. She is among this year's recipients of the Fields Medal, an honor considered to be the Nobel Prize of the mathematics world.

The International Mathematical Union (IMU) gives the prestigious award every 4 years since 1937 to two up to four mathematicians under the age of 40 for "outstanding mathematical acheivement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement."  This year's ceremony took place at IMU's International Math Congress in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday morning.

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Mirzakhani grew up in Iran and entered high school in Tehran right when the Iraq-Iran war ended.  In high school, she made good friends who shared the same interests and kept her motivated.  

She adds that her high school, Farnazegan, had good teachers and a female principal who went to great lengths to give the girls in the school the same opportunities as boys.

As a teenager, Mirzakhani competed in Math Olympiads which trained her to think about different and beautiful solutions to problems.  At Sharrif University, she meet many other mathematicians who kept inspiring her. She completed her PhD at Harvard in the United States in 2004.  She is not only the first woman to recieve the Fields Medal, but also the first from the Middle East.

Mirzakhani's work can be difficult to understand for laymen with no background in advanced and abstract mathematical concepts but she enjoys the challenge.

"The more I spent time on mathematics, the more excited I became," she says.

The Field's Award was given to her for her "outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces."

The current President of the IMU, Ingrid Daubechies, also happens to the the first female in the role.  But this is merely coincidence, she says.  Although she is pleased that the first woman recipient was awarded under her term, it was not an agenda she set out to do.  

Daubechies adds that Mirzakhani's win is "hugely symbolic" and she hopes it will help pave the way for other women mathematicians to rise from the rank and file and be at par with their male counterparts in universities all over the world.

TagsMaryam Mirzakhani, math, Fields Medal, Nobel Prize of Math