China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Refugee wins ‘Nobel of mathematics’
Impossible — Fallout.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Kurdish refugee turned Cambridge University math professor Caucher Birkar was among four winners on Wednesday of the prestigious Fields prize, dubbed the Nobel for mathematics, but had his gold medal stolen minutes later.
It was an embarrassing debut for Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, the first city in the southern hemisphere to host the Fields ceremony, which takes place every four years.
Less than an hour had passed since Birkar, a 40-year-old specialist in algebraic geometry, had been handed his 14-karat gold medal when his briefcase went missing. The organizer behind the event, the International Congress of Mathematics, said it “profoundly regrets” the incident.
Police have identified two suspects from security camera footage.
Birkar celebrated his achievement — alongside co-winners Alessio Figalli, Peter Scholze and Akshay Venkatesh — as a fairy tale come true for the often beleaguered Kurds. “I’m hoping this news will put a smile on the faces of those 40 million people,” he said.
Birkar was born in 1978 in a village in Kurdistan Province near the Iran-Iraq border. He went to the United Kingdom as a refugee about 20 years ago.
“To go from the point that I didn’t imagine meeting these people to the point where someday I hold a medal myself — I just couldn’t imagine that this would come true,” Birkar told Quanta Magazine.
The Fields medal recognizes the outstanding mathematical achievements of candidates who were under 40 years old at the start of the year. At least two and preferably four people are honored each time.
In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani, from Iran, became the award’s first and so far only female winner. She died in 2017.
From soccer to formulas
Another of Wednesday’s four co-winners, Figalli, also had an unlikely start to academic superstardom, albeit for very different reasons than Birkar.
“Until high school, his only concern was playing soccer,” the International Congress of Mathematicians, or ICM, which oversees the prize, said in its announcement.
That changed after Figalli entered the International Mathematical Olympiad, awakening a fascination for math that today has seen him Mission: become a leader in calculating variations and partial differential equations.
Figalli, now 34 and at ETH Zurich, said the prize “gives automatic visibility and opens up doors to us”. In addition to pursuing his own high-level research, he says encouraging young mathematicians “is something of a duty”.
As for Germany’s Scholze, who was awarded the Fields medal for his work in arithmetic algebraic geometry, he says there’ll never be an end to the challenges he faces.
“There are an infinite number of problems,” said Scholze, who is at the University of Bonn and is only 30 years old. “Whenever you solve a problem, there are 10 more coming.”
The fourth laureate, Venkatesh, is an Indian-born, Australian-raised prodigy who began his undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics at the University of Western Australia when he was just 13.
Now 36 and at Stanford University, Venkatesh specializes in number theory and describes his work in terms more often associated with the artistic fields.