UK refugee wins major mathematics award

UK refugee wins Fields Medal

A Cambridge professor who won one of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics, the Fields Medal, has had his award stolen in Brazil.

Professor Caucher Birkar, a Kurd, came to the UK as a refugee from Iran.

The Fields Medals are awarded every four years to the most promising mathematicians under the age of 40.

BBC News

The message in Chinese in the top right (reading top left → top right → bottom left → bottom right) means “found daylight”.

The Fields Medal is named after the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields (1863–1932).

Sir Michael Francis Atiyah … is a British-Lebanese mathematician specialising in geometry.

Riemann hypothesis likely remains unsolved despite claimed proof

At a hotly-anticipated talk at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum today, retired mathematician Michael Atiyah delivered what he claimed was a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, a challenge that has eluded his peers for nearly 160 years.

Sometimes called the riddle of the primes, the Riemann hypothesis is intimately connected to the distribution of prime numbers, those indivisible by any whole number other than themselves and one.

If the hypothesis is proven to be correct, mathematicians would be armed with a map to the location of all such prime numbers, a breakthrough with far-reaching repercussions in the field.

New Scientist