Maryam Mirzakhani Receives 2009 Blumenthal Award

January 6, 2009

Providence, RI---Maryam Mirzakhani of Princeton University is receiving the 2009 Leonard M. and Eleanor B. Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics. Presented every four years by the Leonard M. and Eleanor B. Blumenthal Trust for the Advancement of Mathematics, the award recognizes an individual who has written an outstanding PhD thesis and thereby shows the potential for future distinguished research in mathematics. The award will be given on Tuesday, January 6, 2009, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington, DC.

According to the award citation, Mirzakhani is honored "for her exceptionally creative, highly original thesis. This work combines tools as diverse as hyperbolic geometry, `classical methods' of automorphic forms, and symplectic reduction to obtain results on three different important questions. These results include a recursive formula for Weil-Petersson volumes of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces, a determination of the asymptotics of the number of simple closed geodesics on a hyperbolic surface in terms of length, and a new proof of Witten's Conjecture (originally established by Kontsevich) establishing the KdV recursion for the intersection numbers on moduli space."

The full citation for this prize and additional information can be found in the Prize Booklet. Find out more about AMS prizes at http://www.ams.org/prizes-awards.

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