Winning Numbers: Indian Origin Mathematician and First Lady Winner For Fields Medal This Year
Winning Numbers: Indian Origin Mathematician and First Lady Winner For Fields Medal This Year
An Indian origin mathematician has won the prestigious Fields Medal which is also known as the Nobel Prize for mathematics. Manjul Bhargava is a Canadian-American professor of maths at Princeton University and he is among the four winners of this award for 2014. Another heartening development is the bestowal of the Fields Medal on Iranian born Maryam Mirzakhani who is US professor. The medals are presented at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul once every 4 years.
Other winners of the prize included Professor Martin Hairer from UK's University of Warwick and Dr. Artur Avila a Brazilian mathematician. Avila received his PhD in dynamical systems when he was 21 years of age. Manjul Bhargava has been awarded the "Fields Medal for developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves," according to the award citation. The IMU website also cited Bhargava's work in number theory as having exerted a "a profound influence" in the field of mathematics.
"A mathematician of extraordinary creativity" Bhargava has been credited as having "a taste for simple problems of timeless beauty, which he has solved by developing elegant and powerful new methods that offer deep insights." Bhargava was born in the year 1974 in Canada and he basically grew up in the US. He also spent some years in India. Bhargava has been teaching in Princeton since the year 2003.
The Fields Medal was established by a mathematician from Canada know as John Fields. The Fields Medal is akin to the Nobel Prize for maths. Each awardee is given 15,000 Canadian dollars which amounts to £8,000 in cash prize. Since the institution of this medal in 1936, the Iranian professor Maryam Mirzhakhani became the first lady mathematician to win this prize. "This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians," Mirzakhani was also quoted as saying on website of Stanford University.
Mirzhakhani from Iran also studied at Harvard before she became a professor at Stanford University. She was recognised for her work in ascertaining ways to compute volumes of oddly-shaped curved surfaces. She was born in Teheran in the year 1977 and she received her PhD in the year 2004 from Harvard University. She has expertise and insights into the geometry of unusual forms.
The Fields Medal is given once in every 4 years to multiple winners over 40 years of age. This year, the Fields Medal was handed out by South Korean President Park Geun-Hye in the city of Seoul."I congratulate all the winners, with special applause for Maryam Mirzakhani, whose drive and passion have made her the first woman to win a Fields Medal," Park is quoted by the media has having said. Mirzakhani also discussed how she has a passion for math since her youth and that "It is fun - it's like solving a puzzle or connecting the dots in a detective case. I felt that this was something I could do, and I wanted to pursue this path".
There have been more than 56 winners since the prize was established in the year 1936. Mirzakhani has said that"I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years." Her stellar work in comprehending the symmetry of curved surfaces is widely acknowledged as work that could have an impact on the theoretical physics of how the universe was born. "On behalf of the entire Stanford community, I congratulate Maryam on this incredible recognition, the highest honour in her discipline, the first ever granted to a woman," Stanford President John Hennessy was quoted as saying on the university's website.
