First woman winner of Fields Medal cracks mathematics’ glass ceiling

It will go down in history as the moment one of the last bastions of male dominance fell. A woman has won the world's most prestigious mathematics prize for the first time since the award was established nearly 80 years ago.

Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian maths professor at Stanford University in California, was named the first female winner of the Fields Medal - often described as the Nobel prize for mathematics - at a ceremony in Seoul yesterday.

The maths community has been abuzz with rumours for months that Mirzakhani was in line to win the prize. To outsiders her work is esoteric, abstract and impenetrable. But to more qualified minds, she has a breathtaking scope, is technically superb and boldly ambitious. She describes the language of maths as full of "beauty and elegance".

The prize, worth 15,000 Canadian dollars (HK$106,000) is awarded to exceptional talents under the age of 40 once every four years by the International Mathematical Union. Between two and four prizes are announced each time.

Three other researchers were named Fields Medal winners at the same ceremony in South Korea: Martin Hairer, a 38-year-old Austrian based at Warwick University in Britain, Manjul Bhargava, a 40-year old Canadian-American at Princeton University in the United States and Artur Avila, 35, a Brazilian-French researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of Jussieu in Paris.

There have been 55 Fields medallists since the prize was first awarded in 1936, including this year's winners. The Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman refused the prize in 2006 for his proof of the Poincare conjecture.