Top Math Prize Has Its First Female Winner
By KENNETH CHANG

An Iranian mathematician is the first woman ever to receive a Fields Medal, often considered to be mathematics’ equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

The recipient, Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor at Stanford, was one of four winners honored on Wednesday at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul, South Korea.

The Fields Medal is given every four years, and several can be awarded at once. The other recipients this year are Artur Avila of the National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Brazil and the National Center for Scientific Research in France; Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University; and Martin Hairer of the University of Warwick in England.

The 52 medalists from previous years were all men.

“This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians,” Dr. Mirzakhani was quoted as saying in a Stanford news release on Tuesday. “I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years.”

Ingrid Daubechies, a professor of mathematics at Duke and president of the International Mathematical Union, called the news “a great joy” in an email.

“All researchers in mathematics will tell you that there is no difference between the math done by a woman or a man, and of course the decision of the Fields Medal committee is based only on the results of each candidate,” she wrote. “That said, I bet the vast majority of the mathematicians in the world will be happy that it will no longer be possible to say that ‘the Fields Medal has always been awarded only to men.’ ”

Much of the research by Dr. Mirzakhani, who was born in Tehran in 1977, has involved the behavior of dynamical systems. There are no exact mathematical solutions for many dynamical systems, even simple ones.

“What Maryam discovered is that in another regime, the dynamical orbits are tightly constrained to follow algebraic laws,” said Curtis T. McMullen, a professor at Harvard who was Dr. Mirzakhani’s doctoral adviser. “These dynamical systems describe surfaces with many handles, like pretzels, whose shape is evolving over time by twisting and stretching in a precise way. They are related to billiards on tables that are not rectangular but still polygonal, like the regular octagon.”

Dr. Avila, 35, investigated a different area of dynamical systems, including an understanding of fractals. Dr. Bhargava, 40, was recognized for new methods in the geometry of numbers, especially prime numbers, and Dr. Hairer, 38, made advances in the study of the effect of random noise on partial differential equations, capturing the effect of turbulence on ocean currents or the flow of air around airplane wings.

While women have reached parity in many academic fields, mathematics is still dominated by men, who earn about 70 percent of the doctoral degrees. The disparity is even more striking at the highest echelons. Since 2003, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has awarded the Abel Prize, recognizing outstanding mathematicians with a monetary award of about $1 million; all 14 recipients so far are men. No woman has won the Wolf Prize in Mathematics, another prestigious award.

The Fields Medal was conceived by John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician, “in recognition of work already done” and as “an encouragement for further achievement.” Judges have interpreted the terms of the Fields trust to mean that the award should usually be limited to mathematicians age 40 or younger.

Dr. McMullen, himself a Fields medalist, did not speculate on why it had taken so long for a woman to be recognized. “I would prefer to look forward and celebrate this occasion,” he said, “and see it as a sign of positive trends in society and in science.”

數學界諾貝爾獎 首位女性奪費爾茲獎

任教於加州史丹福大學的卅七歲伊朗數學家米爾札哈尼，十三日獲頒國際數學界最高榮譽「費爾茲獎」（Fields Medal），是首位女性得主，也是伊朗第一人。

國際數學家大會在南韓首爾的會議上宣布「費爾茲獎」四位得主，其中一位就是1977年在德黑蘭出生，在伊朗完成大學學業後到哈佛深造並取得博士學位的米爾札哈尼。

費爾茲獎的地位相當於數學界的諾貝爾獎。由國際數學家聯盟執行委員會遴選，自1936年起在每四年一次的國際數學家大會中頒發。每屆得獎人二至四人，最特殊的規定是只頒發給年齡小於四十歲的數學家。

中研院院士丘成桐和澳洲數學家陶哲軒是僅有的華人得主。本屆以前共有五十二位得主，全都是男性。

米爾札哈尼專長幾何學，曾提出多種計算雙曲平面的新方法。她做的是幾何和動態系統相關的工作。成果可以應用到量子場論中。

國際數學家大會發布的聲明說：「她熟稔多種數學技巧與不同的數學修養，很難得地集超強的技術能力、大無畏的雄心、遠大的眼光與無窮的好奇心於一身。」

米爾札哈尼透過史丹福大學發新聞稿：「這是一項殊榮，若能因此鼓勵年輕的女性科學家和數學家，我會很高興，也確定未來會有更多的女性獲此殊榮。」

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/science/top-math-prize-has-its-first-female-winner.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/science/20140813/c13math/zh-hant/

2014-08-14．聯合報．A12．國際．編譯張佑生