Mirzakhani is humble — when she got word of her award, she assumed it came from a hacked e-mail account — and extremely private.

博主按： 这个获奖根本没有想到自己获奖， 换句话说，没想到自己的工作那么重要。

看来若是申请大奖的话，这些人根本没戏。 中国的大奖申请者都是理直气壮，单位支持，因此这些奖才是值得称颂的，含金量当然应该高。  

http://news.sciencenet.cn/htmlnews/2014/12/309592.shtm

MARYAM MIRZAKHANI: Surface explorer

A mathematician's award shines a light on a lack of women in the field.
By Erica Klarreich

When Maryam Mirzakhani was a mathematics graduate student at Harvard University in 2003, she went to her adviser, Curtis McMullen, with a question. McMullen had just solved a long-standing problem related to the behaviour of billiard balls on a type of abstract table that can be folded up into a doughnut surface with two holes. It was a major discovery, but Mirzakhani asked why he had proved it just for surfaces with two holes, rather than for complex surfaces with even more. She was drawn to the largest possible problem — even if she had no idea, back then, just how hard it would be to solve. “Maybe sometimes not knowing enough is a blessing,” she says, “because then you just do your thing.”

Mirzakhani, now at Stanford University in California, turned this problem over in her mind for almost a decade, until she found an answer. In a 172-page paper written in 2012 with Alex Eskin of the University of Chicago, Illinois, she extended McMullen's result to all surfaces with two or more doughnut holes, tying together disparate mathematical fields such as geometry, topology and dynamical systems (A. Eskin and M. Mirzakhani Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.3320; 2013). “It's a spectacular result,” says Howard Masur, a mathematician at the University of Chicago. In August, Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal, often called mathematics' Nobel prize, for this and other advances in pure mathematics. Among her other findings is a surprising link between hyperbolic geometry — the geometry of saddle shapes — and string theory.

Mirzakhani is humble — when she got word of her award, she assumed it came from a hacked e-mail account — and extremely private. She kept a low profile after her prize was announced, but the news was greeted with an explosion of interest elsewhere. It raced through social media and the press, reaching outlets such as the fashion magazine Elle and the feminist blog Jezebel. Most of the discussion was not about abstract surfaces, however: it was about how the Iranian-born mathematician was the only woman to receive the Fields Medal since the prize was first awarded in 1936.

The commotion threw a spotlight on the vast under-representation of women in mathematics: according to a 2012 survey of US universities by the American Mathematical Society, women make up only 30% of PhD students — a number that has not budged for years — and only 12% of tenured faculty members at PhD-granting universities. Those who do become tenured

mathematics professors receive a disproportionately small number of scholarly awards.

Mirzakhani says that she has not encountered any outright discrimination against women, but that there are subtle cultural forces that can undermine their confidence, such as a shortage of peers and a perception among girls that mathematics isn't “cool”. She hopes her award will inspire confidence in female mathematicians — and others believe that it will change how they are perceived. From now on, “no one will be able to think about the Fields Medal without picturing Maryam Mirzakhani”, says Ruth Charney, a mathematician at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and president of the Association for Women in Mathematics. “It's a clear signal that there are women doing absolutely top-notch mathematics — in case anyone wasn't sure.”

Mirzakhani is sure, and she predicts more female Fields Medal winners soon. Meanwhile, she is focusing on pushing her analysis of billiard surfaces even further. She regards herself as a discoverer, not an inventor, of mathematics. “I see it as exploring some unknown territory,” she says. “It's an adventurous thing, trying to find the connections.”

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