Another Iranian wins the prestigious Fields award but the medal is stolen from him!
Independent Aggregator of Iran-related News/Events, Kodoom.com: On Wednesday, Caucher Birkar, an Iranian born mathematician, also known as Fereydoun Derakhshani, was awarded the 2018 Fields Medal, also known as the Nobel Prize for mathematics, but he had his gold medal stolen minutes after it was given to him!
It was an embarrassing debut for crime-ridden Rio, the first Latin American city ever 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.
Caucher Birkar, a Kurdish Iranian refugee turned Cambridge University math professor, was among four winners of the prestigious Fields Medal on Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro.
In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born Stanford University professor became the first and only woman to win the prestigious Fields medal in mathematics. She later died in the United States of breast cancer at the age of 40 but her daughter Anahita was declared ineligible for an Iranian passport despite Mirzakhani's wish because Iran's Islamic laws forbid citizenship to children of Iranian-born women and foreign husbands. Mirzakhani's husband, Jan Vondrák, also a mathematics Professor at Stanford, is neither Muslim, nor Iranian.
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