The Prestige: How math became a battlefield for political ideologues (Part 1)

Karen Uhlenbeck, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, is the first woman to win the most prestigious prize in mathematics. Except that she isn't!

If you're interested in the topic, you would assume that the professor won the Fields-Medal. In popular culture the award was famously mentioned in the movie 'Good Will Hunting'. That was my first thought, after reading the headlines of several articles on this matter. My second thought was "Wouldn't that make her the second woman to win the most prestigious award in mathematics?". After all there already was a woman in 2014, who became the first woman to win the most prestigious award in mathematics. After the initial confusion I tried to make sense of why apparently the entire media had decided, that the Fields-Medal had lost its prestige and picked the Abel-Prize (never heard of it) as the new 'Number One'. It was either a simple error, which is thinkable in the era of sloppy journalism, or there was an agenda behind it. After looking up the name of the female winner of the 2014 Fields-Medal I'm pretty positive it's the latter.

The statutes of the Fields-Medal determine that the recipients have to be under 40 years of age. She was born in 1977 and died in 2017 at the age of 40. Her name was Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian woman who was a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.