We are delighted to announce an $800,000 gift pledge from distinguished engineers and entrepreneurs Dr. Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard and Anousheh Ansari to establish an endowed graduate fellowship in honor of our late colleague, Professor of Mathematics Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017). The Maryam Mirzakhani Graduate Fellowship will support graduate students in the Department of Mathematics at Stanford.

Christiane Rousseau, Université de Montréal, receives the inaugural Bertrand Russell Prize of the AMS in recognition of her many contributions furthering human values and the common good through mathematics.

Throughout her career, Professor Rousseau has inspired people of all ages and diverse backgrounds through her lectures, publications, and a wide range of activities reaching out to the general public. In particular, through her visionary leadership of the thematic year Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013 and her continuing active involvement in the ongoing activities that grew from it, Professor Rousseau has created opportunities for the mathematics community worldwide to confront crucial challenges facing our planet while highlighting the contributions of mathematicians to the well-being of society.

Christiane served as president of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 2002 to 2004, vice president of the International Mathematical Union from 2011 to 2014, and has been a member of the Scientific Board of UNESCO’s International Basic Sciences Program since 2015. She was named an AMS Fellow in 2013 and won the MAA’s George Pólya Prize in 2014 for her article “How Inge Lehmann Discovered the Inner Core of the Earth” (The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 45, no. 3). 

Congratulations Christaine!

There will be a memorial celebration of the life of Maryam Mirzakhani on Saturday, October 21st, 3:00-5:00 pm in the Cemex Auditorium, Stanford University.  It is being organized by the Stanford Mathematics Department, with the guidance of Jan Vondrak and the rest of Maryam’s family.

The ceremony will feature reminiscences from family and friends, including some of Maryam’s mathematical colleagues.  It is  also expected that there will  be visual and musical presentations, reflecting her life and interests.

The event will be open to the public, live streamed, and the video later posted online.

The link for the live stream is here.

CWM invites proposals for funding of up to €3000 for activities or initiatives taking place in 2018, aimed at either (a) establishing or supporting networks for women in mathematics, preferably at the continental or regional level, and with priority given to networks in developing or emerging countries or (b) organizing a mathematical school open to all with all women speakers and mainly women organisers or (c) other ideas for researching and/or addressing issues encountered by women in mathematics. For more details see here.

Watch the great new video of the  meeting Women in Mathematics in Latin America: Barriers, Advancements and New Perspectives  held in Oaxaca, Mexico, August 2016.

Even if you don’t speak Spanish you can find much to enjoy!

The meeting was hosted by the Casa Matemática Oaxaca in collaboration with the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery, and part sponsored by CWM.

Another great female mathematician, Marina Ratner, passed away  on July 7th, 2017. Marina played in a key role in linking up the Russian and western schools of dynamical systems and later became famous for her beautiful theorems on unipotent flows on homogeneous spaces, and their application to questions in number theory, see for example on the blog by Terence Tao here.

She is survived by her daughter Anna Ratner, son-in-law Charles Cox, grandchildren Bryan and Maya, and nephews Michael Bialy (a Professor of Mathematics at Tel Aviv University) and Alex Bialy.

The CWM led  Gender Gap Project has just launched its own website with news and up to date information.

We are very deeply saddened by the news that Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the Fields medal,  passed away today, Saturday July 15th 2017, at the age of 40.

A brilliant mathematician, she has been an inspiration to so many. She will be sorely missed. Our condolences to her family and friends.

Her beautiful mathematics will stand as a memorial long after those of us who have had the privilege of knowing her personally are gone.

Various links with tributes and information on her life and career can be found on the EWM website here.

For a page of tributes set up by the AMS see here.

Here is an interview with Maryam in the Guardian  from August 2014, together with some more links and here is an obituary by Martin Bridson,  July 2017.

A very nice and informative interview by Erica Klarreich which appeared in Quanta magazine in 2014 is here.