A woman has won the Fields medal for the first time ever. Maryam Mirzakhani, from Stanford University in California was today awarded the medal from the International Congress of Mathematics.
The prestigious award is given every four years to recipients who must be under forty at the beginning of the year. The award dates back to 1936 – and every recipient until now has been male.
Mirzakani first attracted attention for her mathematical capabilities after becoming the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1995. Her current research focuses on the geometry of moduli space, a complex geometric and algebraic entity that might be described as a universe in which every point is itself a universe.
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Photograph: Reuters
