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# 2014 Fields Medallist

Maryam Mirzakhani is the first woman to win the Fields Medal due to her contributions in understanding of the symmetry of curved surfaces.

Mirzakhani and Eskin decided to tackle one of the largest open problems in their field. It concerned the range of behaviors of a ball that is bouncing around a billiard table shaped like any polygon, provided the angles are a rational number of degrees. Billiards provides some of the simplest examples of dynamical systems — systems that evolve over time according to a given set of rules — but the behavior of the ball has proven unexpectedly hard to pin down.

We've seen simple examples of these questions, and are familiar with using the "reflection property" to help us imagine the path of the ball. Specifically, instead of imagining the ball bouncing away, we let the ball continue in it's path and instead reflect the entire billiard table. In this way, the numerous reflected billiard tables allow us to easily consider the path of the ball.

Andrew extends this question further in Bouncing Off of the sides of a Triangle Forever, and posed a question where the "billiard table" is a triangle.

In David's set Complete and Utter Chaos, he demonstrates how this simple idea is related to chaos theory.

Note: Maryam was also the first female contestant fielded by Iran at the IMO!

You can find out more on from BBC or Stanford News

###### Image credit: Maryam Mirzakhani

Note by Calvin Lin
3 years, 5 months ago

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Maryam Mirzakhani showed us girls should not fear to go where not many women went before them.

- 2 years, 9 months ago

Were you able to meet her / attend any talks given by her? That would be so exciting!

Glad you're back after missing a year of Brilliant :)

Staff - 2 years, 9 months ago

Unfortunately not, she invited to 3rd conference of "frontiers in mathematical sciences" which was held in IPM, Tehran, Iran, but she could not come, I don't know why!! It would be very very exciting and nice if she can come to iran for a seminar or something, so we can meet her.

And thank you very much sir, I was very busy due to my MSc project and I could barely log in.

- 2 years, 9 months ago

Also, Sir Manjul Bhargava is the first mathematician from India (professor at Princeton University) to have recieve the fields medal in 2014. His work on Number Theory is really remarkable.

- 2 years, 5 months ago

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