Off-topic: If you want to learn how – as a conference speaker – you should refer to a very nice blog post in a way that is both accurate and entertaining for the audience, see Suvrat Raju's Strings 2014 talk, 25:40-25:50. Thanks, Suvrat. ;-) Some of the people are laughing because by mentioning "a very nice blog post", Suvrat had offered them too little information – approximately by \(k\ln(6,000)\) because as of today, there are 6,000 very nice TRF blog posts. ;-)Using the normal distribution, La Griffe du Lion has predicted a female winner of the Fields medal, the most well-known prize in mathematics, to surface once in 103 years. If you have won a Fields medal yourself, you may calculate that four winners are announced every 4 years which means that it's \(4/4=\) one winner per year in average.
After 70 years of the award, we have the first female Fields medalist. Maryam Mirzakhani is Persian, was born in Tehran in 1977, was trained at Harvard and received her PhD in 2004, and is currently a Stanford professor.
Looking at the list of papers, I wouldn't be able to recognize them from some above-average papers in mathematics – but I don't belong to that culture. But she has surely published an impressive amount of papers.
No one cares about men but
The other three winners this year were Artur Avila of France, Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University in New Jersey, and Martin Hairer of the University of Warwick in Britain.Maryam has been my fellow Harvard Junior Fellow for some time – I think that we even overlapped for a whole year, 2003-2004 – but my memory is limited. I remember her first name, however. Let me admit that I only realized that an hour after I posted the original version of this blog post.
Congratulations to the winners and especially Maryam!
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