Kurdistan was an unlikely place for a kid to develop an interest in mathematics - I'm hoping that this news will put a smile on the faces of those 40 million people.
- Caucher Birkar
Professor Birkar, who originally came to the UK as a Kurdish refugee, was given the award today at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The Fields medals, often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics, are awarded every four years. Medallists must be under the age of 40 by the start of the year they receive the award, with up to four mathematicians honoured at a time. Awarded for the first time in 1936, the medal is recognition for works of excellence and an incentive for new outstanding achievements.
Birkar, a member of Cambridge’s Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, won the award for his work on categorising different kinds of polynomial equations. He proved that the infinite variety of such equations can be split into a finite number of classifications, a major breakthrough in the field of arithmetic geometry. Born in a Kurdish village in pre-revolutionary Iran, Birkar sought and obtained political asylum in the UK while finishing his undergraduate degree in Iran.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge