There is a first 4 everything.

There is a first 4 everything.

Congratulations to Maryam Mirzakhani for being the first female to win the Fields Medal.

h/t Gnotic Pasta 

Originally shared by STEM Women on G+

Maryam Mirzakhani, the first female winner of Fields Medal

Often described as the “mathematician’s Nobel Prize”, the Fields Medal has never been won by a female mathematician since it was established in 1936. Until now.

“A native of Iran, Maryam Mirzakhani is at Stanford University in California. She won for her work on “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.”

“Perhaps Maryam’s most important achievement is her work on dynamics,” says Curtis McMullen of Harvard University. Many natural problems in dynamics, such as the three-body problem of celestial mechanics (for example, interactions of the Sun, the Moon and Earth), have no exact mathematical solution. Mirzakhani found that in dynamical systems evolving in ways that twist and stretch their shape, the systems’ trajectories “are tightly constrained to follow algebraic laws”, says McMullen

Read more at http://www.nature.com/news/iranian-is-first-woman-to-nab-highest-prize-in-maths-1.15686