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In 2014 Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician at Stanford University, became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, one of the highest honours in mathematics. She won it for work on the geometry of curved surfaces and on the space of all the shapes such surfaces can take.

Maryam Mirzakhani

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In her field, a Riemann surface can be pictured as a doughnut-like surface with one or more holes, and its moduli space as a map in which every point stands for one possible shape of that surface. Mirzakhani, born in Tehran in 1977, made her name with her 2004 Harvard doctorate. It worked out how the number of simple closed geodesics, loops on the surface that never cross themselves and are as short as possible, grows with their length, and used that to measure the size of moduli spaces. She joined Stanford in 2009 and worked by drawing on large sheets of paper, which her young daughter called “painting”. She was also the first Iranian to win the Fields Medal. She died of breast cancer in 2017, aged 40, and her birthday, 12 May, is now International Women in Mathematics Day.

Türkçe oku
İranlı matematikçi Meryem Mirzahani, 2014'te matematiğin en saygın ödüllerinden Fields Madalyası'nı kazanan ilk kadın oldu. Stanford Üniversitesi'nde çalışan Mirzahani ödülü, eğri yüzeylerin geometrisi ve bu yüzeylerin alabileceği bütün biçimler üzerine yaptığı çalışmalarla aldı.

Bu alanda bir Riemann yüzeyi, bir ya da birkaç deliği olan simit benzeri bir yüzey olarak düşünülebilir. Modül uzayı ise her noktası bu yüzeyin alabileceği biçimlerden birine karşılık gelen bir tür haritadır. 1977'de Tahran'da doğan Mirzahani, 2004'te Harvard'da tamamladığı doktora teziyle adını duyurdu. Bu tür yüzeylerde kendini hiç kesmeyen en kısa kapalı yolların, yani basit kapalı jeodeziklerin, uzunluk arttıkça nasıl çoğaldığını hesapladı ve bu sonuçla modül uzaylarının büyüklüğünü ölçtü. 2009'da Stanford'a geçti. Büyük kâğıtlara çizerek çalışırdı; küçük kızı buna “resim yapmak” derdi. Fields Madalyası'nı alan ilk İranlı da odur. 2017'de, 40 yaşında meme kanserinden öldü. Doğum günü olan 12 Mayıs bugün Uluslararası Matematikte Kadınlar Günü olarak kutlanıyor.

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