Two rare women in history have been awarded the Fields Medal

Of the 64 mathematicians who have been awarded the Fields Medal in mathematics, only two are women. They are Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani and Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska.

Former South Korean President Park Geun Hye (left) presents the Fields Medal to Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul on August 13, 2014 - Photo: WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Fields Medals are awarded to two, three or four mathematicians under the age of 40 at international mathematical congresses of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), which take place every four years and are held in various parts of the world.

The prize is named after Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields.

The Fields Medal is one of the most prestigious awards for a mathematician. Although there are many differences in the frequency of the award, the number of awards, the age limit and the award criteria, the Fields Medal is still considered by the mathematicians as the Nobel Prize in Mathematics for young people.

The first recipients of this prize were Finnish mathematician Lars Ahlfors, and American mathematician Jesse Douglas in 1936.

Since 1950, this mathematics prize has been awarded every four years to recognize the achievements, talents and support of young mathematical research around the world.

Professor Ngo Bao Chau was the first Vietnamese to win the prestigious award in 2010, at the age of 38, with his work proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms conjectured by Robert Langlands and Diana Shelstad.

As of the 2022 awarding, 64 mathematicians have been awarded the Fields Medal. However, only two of them are women.

In 2014, Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman, and the first Iranian, to receive the Fields Medal.

Ms. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1977. She received her PhD in mathematics from Harvard University in 2004, and taught at Princeton University before joining Stanford as a professor of mathematics in 2008.

Her research interests include Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. She died of breast cancer on July 15, 2017, at the age of 40.

Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska becomes the second woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal in mathematics - Photo: WALL STREET JOURNAL

In 2022, Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska became the second woman and first Ukrainian to win the Fields Medal.

Born in 1984 in Kiev, Ukraine, Viazovska won the Fields Medal for her work on sphere packing, a problem that has frustrated mathematicians for hundreds of years. Essentially, the work involves finding a way to pack spheres into a container that takes up the least amount of space.

She graduated from Taras Shevchenko National University in Kiev before earning a master's degree from the University of Kaiserslautern and a doctorate from the University of Bonn, both in Germany. She is currently a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

At the Fields Medal ceremony in Helsinki, Finland in 2022, Ms. Viazovska said she felt sad to be only the second woman to receive the prestigious award, and she hoped this would change in the future.

In 90 years only five women have won the mathematics prize.

According to statistics from the science magazine Nature , the world has only recorded five women winning prestigious awards in the field of mathematics, as of 2024.

The six most prestigious prizes in mathematics – the Fields Medal, the Abel, Shaw, Wolf, Crafoord and Breakthrough prizes – have been awarded a total of 217 times, but only seven have been to women.

Iranian mathematician Mirzakhani is the first woman in the world to win the most prestigious prize in mathematics.

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Source: https://tuoitre.vn/hai-nguoi-phu-nu-hiem-hoi-trong-lich-su-tung-duoc-trao-huy-chuong-fields-20250416141036862.htm