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Maryam Mirzakhani Is the First Woman Fields Medalist
An anonymous reader sends news that the 2014 Fields Medals have been awarded for outstanding work in the field of mathematics. The winners are Artur Avila, Manjul Bhargava, Martin Hairer, and Maryam Mirzakhani. Quanta Magazine writes,
Mirzakhani is the first woman to win a Fields Medal. The gender imbalance in mathematics is long-standing and pervasive, and the Fields Medal, in particular, is ill-suited to the career arcs of many female mathematicians. It is restricted to mathematicians younger than 40, focusing on the very years during which many women dial back their careers to raise children. Mirzakhani feels certain, however, that there will be many more female Fields medalists in the future. "There are really many great female mathematicians doing great things," she said.
Quanta has profiles of the other winners as well (Avila, Bhargava, Hairer), and of Rolf Nevanlinna Prize winner Subhash Khot.
cant we just be happy for the woman instead of turning it into some gender inequality thing?
I mean seriously this woman hit a major achievement, And its being muddled by people with an agenda, let her have her moment
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The original idea behind the under-40 rule was to encourage further work from mathematicians not yet "over-the-hill" in their careers. But math is no longer a young man's game, if it ever really was. And like TFS says, the rule tends to be sexist in practice too.
Sure, anything rather than pumping out more man-monkeys. We have enough already.
>The gender imbalance in mathematics is long-standing and pervasive...
Enough of this stupid clickbait shit. Good math doesn't know gender.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
she is from Iran.
I'll leave it to the crowd to cite the 20+ male candiates that were more deserving.
In much the same way Obama was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of a society that sometimes you gotta go with your gut, even when you KNOW the consequences. Really, i'm not complaining. This type of behavior explains QM in much simpler way. Although Spooky action at distance was not a racist remark when Einstein said it.
Three...two...one...
Good Wilma Hunting
they can award it or haul coal with it if they want to.
Yes, the math doesn't know gender, but the mathematicians who evaluate each other (say for promotion or for prizes) do know. Yes, the situation today is very different from the past, but biases do exist. For a strongly worded view point on this try Izabella Laba.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://Lenny.com
The five winners are -
One Iranian
One Brazilian
One Austrian
Two Indians
Okay ... where are the Africans ? Where are the Chinese ? Are they freeloaders ?
for outstanding mathematical achievement?
Go figure....
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BTW - this is supposed to be a pun....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Or are we too caught up in how she is a woman to actually acknowledge her success?
That way, there's a pretty good chance that you will see that movie again soon.
This time you may actually realize that the main character rejected the future of Fields Medals and working for the NSA, as well as a life of a construction worker who gets drunk with his palls and gets into fights - "cause he had to go see about a girl".
Also there's that whole thing about him being molested and abandoned as a child and the traumas stemming from that, and him learning to cope with it all.
Let's celebrate like topologists --- with donuts and mugs of coffee!
Finding God in a Dog
Men and Women are not the same. Men tend to spread out wider both dumber and smarter then the mean aka they have larger standard deviation then women in both intelligence and sanity level. Scientist who don't want to be harassed, believe it is due to the missing genes duplicate copies on the Y chromosome vs X chromosome. Cells tend to randomly pick one chromosome or the other in women, but in men they have to use the genes on the only X chromosome. If this chromosome is abnormal the male will have those treats which might give a potential for super intelligence or stupidity, but a women will show the same level of abnormality because of only around half her cells will follow the abnormal gene, if they are not present on both chromosomes.
Now for those women who have two super intelligent giving genes, they are less likely to reach there potential then a man with one super intelligent because of social conventions. So this two factors explain why women are less likely to be super successful in life but at the same time less likely to be total losers.
I studied math at Stanford. She was always the answer to the question "Who in this department will win a Fields medal next?" I wasn't really qualified to comment.
But I guess they were right.
Just like every previous one. Gotta treat everyone the same now, don't we?
Artur Avila is the first field Medal ever to a latin american.
Woman is not a gender adjective. Woman is a freaking noun. All of you morons posting about how smart she is and you don't know shit about grammar.
One winner out of five happens to be a female, and all of the sudden the PC themed "Sexual Inequalities" emerged
And the fact that there were no Africans nor East Asians were among the five, all of the sudden the PC-related "Where are the Africans / Chinese" topic emerged
For crying out loud, this is about MATH, and I am really sick and tired with people dragging sex / race / whatever into fields of Math and Science --- as these two are more to the BRAINS rather than anything else
Please, people, can you please leave Math and Science alone ?
Congrats to Maryam Mirzakhani for being the first woman to win the Fields Medal.
Congrats to Maryam Mirzakhani for being the first Iranian to win the Fields Medal.
I hope she is an inspiration to women everywhere and especially to Iranian women. I'm not one for hero worship but there is much real value in inspirational figures.
And as far as I can tell, it is an undeniably deserved prize. [edit: I was going to contrast with some other prize winners but this is not the place nor time]
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I think she deserves a somewhat larger wiki page.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I skimmed TFA to find the actual math she earned it for. The summary they give is actually pretty interesting, even though they don't go into much detail on the math. Definitely doesn't seem like a bullshit hey-look-we're-giving-awards-to-minorities-too-now award.
This seems to be the actual paper, although to be honest it's so far above my knowledge that it could be about something completely different and I wouldn't be able to tell.
First of all, congrats to Ms. Mizrakhani for her award, and it is indeed notable. That put aside, there are a few important reasons why I think Maths education is f***ed up in university which prevents more girls and women from doing it. These reasons are:
While learning maths, the tests are given without an open material, and often require memorising proofs of many pages. This is while a good mathematician can easily look these up and does not need to keep them in his resident mind and that a mathematician or other real scientist is more about deducting and inventive thought than about memorising.
Finishing a maths degree requires a complete buyout into the system, which risks transforming the students into Captain Nemos who are cynical, destructive, people who think they are a "nobody", which is what "Nemo" means in Latin. Also see what I wrote about it in a different context.
Now girls are by their nature, have been more unwilling to become Captain Nemos, and also realise that in this day and age, being an amateur, who are people who love (= 'aime') what they do, and/or who cut corners and disobey the rules, or are willing to produce somewhat less stellar results, is much better than being a professional, which is a mostly 20th century fad. It is well known that in many fields of endeavour some people who are underage, and/or inexperienced, and/or less professional can beat the pros at their own game: software development, music, acting and film making, martial arts and other combat fighting, modelling, writing (blogging, novelling, etc.), being a waiter/waitress/shop clerk/shop vendor/etc, cooking, even sports. And yet maths education in our f***ked-up university system believes that a mathematician should be a "Captain Nemo"-like professional than a happy, well-rounded, polymath, amateur (a.k.a a "geek").
You can also see what I wrote about amateurs and hackers (a.k.a "Action heroes" in a different ccontext.).
Another problem is the fallout from Euclid's reported “There is no Royal road to Geometry” adage. Thing is, when teaching maths, you can and should skip some stuff and show the cool stuff. There is no need to teach the very basics and instead one can skip stuff. I recall that we didn't learn the Jewish Bible from its beginning to its end, and we also skipped eras when studying history, and stuff like that. A lot of the material I had to learn in my Electrical Engineering degree, such as the physics of semiconductors proved of zero utility to my work as a software developer, and later on as a writer/entertainer/philosopher, which is what I am now.
There are other problems with the academic world: instead of collecting donations at the end of the lectures or otherwise getting a motivation to be popular (like philosophers did at ancient times), the so-called scientists/philosophers are getting tenured positions, and don't want or need to try to improve (which makes their students unhappy). Currently, the world's best philosophers (or in their modern name: "scientists") are the various entertainers of the world: actors, screenwriters, authors, bloggers, models, musicians, T.V. celebrities, YouTube/etc. artists, talk show hosts, etc. etc. 50 or even 20 years from now, people are more likely to remember a famous actor, directory, blogger, or even - model - than a university professor of philosophy, which I cannot name a single one, and do not care to remember any one of them. And many more people are likely to read or watch an interview with Jennifer Lawrence, E
We have two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we read. http://www.shlomifish.org/
I thought it was Abel, but I saw an article today saying it was Fields.
n/t
Yup, have to tout the sex of the person who won versus the achievement. Slashdot is starting to really get mired down in this PC stuff.
WTF??? Memorizing in maths? Are you nuts? Or are you talking of second tier math courses (maths for non-mathematicians)? I don't know what university are you talking about, but mine trim the useless in the first couple of years, and whoever tries to memorize ANYTHING is guaranteed to fail, miserably.
Hey! What's wrong with being nobody? (See my username.)
It would be appropriate if the medal was made of Field's metal.
A typo in the last paragraph of the paper. It's supposed to say "easy" and it says "esy". Does that make me the actual Field's medal winner??? Nah, just kidding. Congrats to Maryam Mirzakhan!!!
Congrats to Maryam Mirzakhani!!! Missed the i when I was copying. Oops.