First time a Woman wins Top Mathematics Prize Award

An Iranian female mathematician wins the equivalent of the Nobel prize for Math. First time a female, first time an Iranian, first time someone from a Muslim background wins the award.

Maryam Mirzakhani, 37 years old, will be awarded the Fields Medal — widely considered math’s Nobel Prize, since there is no Nobel for mathematics — at a ceremony in Seoul on Wednesday morning. Born and raised in Iran, she has been a professor at Stanford University since 2008.
She’s a graduate of the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, a PhD from Harvard, and has been a Professor at Stanford. May she serve to inspire young girls everywhere of all they can aspire to.
Her research is on “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.”

“In the U.S. about 30% of the graduate population at research departments are women,” said Daubechies. “But a higher percentage of women leave academia than men, so we have an even lower percentage of women postdocs and an even lower percentage of women in faculty. It is not just that the numbers are small, it is also that more leave percentage wise I hope that will change.”