Dr Mirzakhani, who is a Professor at Stanford University in California, became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, along with three other medallists at the International Congress of Mathematicians this week in Seoul, South Korea.
She completed her PhD at Harvard in 2004 and has become an expert in the geometry of unusual forms, working with the behaviour of dynamical systems.
“What Maryam discovered is that in another regime, the dynamical orbits are tightly constrained to follow algebraic laws,” said Curtis McMullen, a professor at Harvard who was Dr Mirzakhani’s doctoral adviser.
Dr Mirzakhani said she hoped her success would encourage other young women to enter the fields of science and mathematics.
“I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years,” she said.
It would be a welcomed move in Australia given the number of girls studying maths and science in their final year of school is in sharp decline. A University of Sydney report released last year revealed a 14 per cent drop in girls enrolling in Year 12 maths in NSW from 2001 to 2011.
The percentage drop for boys enrolling in Year 12 maths during this time was less than half of girls, making disparity between genders in the field even larger than it was in the 1980s, according to the report.
Although 45 per cent of the Australian workforce is female, leaves women studying engineering and science degrees few and far between.
Women only took 14 per cent of Australian engineering degree places in 2012, according to Engineering Australia.
The Fields Medal, which is awarded every four years to up to four people, recognises outstanding mathematical achievement and future achievement.
Dr Mirzakhani is the first and only female amongst the 56 medallists since the award was first established in 1936.
But it’s not her first time dominating the international mathematics stage.
In 1995 she obtained a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad as a high school student.
