About the Award
The Mirzakhani Prize (formerly the NAS Award in Mathematics) was established in 1988 by the American Mathematical Society in honor of its centennial. The prize was renamed to honor the late Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017), a highly accomplished and talented mathematician, professor at Stanford University, and member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, often equated in stature with the Nobel Prize. Made possible through generous gifts from the Simons Foundation and other benefactors, this $20,000 prize will be awarded biennially for exceptional contributions to the mathematical sciences by a mid-career mathematician.
Sylvia Serfaty, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, received the 2024 Maryam Mirzakhani Prize in Mathematics.
Serfaty has made impactful contributions to the study of nonlinear partial differential equations, variational problems, and statistical physics problems.
More precisely, Serfaty has studied problems from condensed matter physics, in particular superconductivity and micromagnetics, Coulomb systems, and vortex dynamics. She has developed fundamentally new techniques for analyzing the dynamics of interacting particles or defects and the spatial patterns they form.
Her creative approach and capacity to work on a diverse but coherent family of problems shed new light on the Ginzburg-Landau model of superconductivity and the statistical mechanics of Coulomb-type systems.
Award History
The first prize was awarded to Robert Langlands for his extraordinary vision, which has brought the theory of group representations into a revolutionary new relationship with the theory of automorphic forms and number theory. Previous recipients have gone on to win other major awards in mathematics, such as the Abel Prize.
Most Recent Recipient
