Kurdish refugee wins 'Nobel of mathematics' Fields medal

Kurdish refugee turned Cambridge University math professor Caucher Birkar was among four winners of the prestigious Fields prize, dubbed the Nobel for mathematics, but had his gold medal stolen minutes later.

It was an embarrassing debut for crime-ridden Rio de Janeiro, the first Latin American city ever to host the Fields ceremony yesterday, which takes place every four years.

Less than an hour had passed since Birkar, a 40-year-old specialist in algebraic geometry, had been handed his 14 karat gold medal when his briefcase went missing.

The organizer behind the event, the International Congress of Mathematics, said it "profoundly regrets" the incident.

Birkar celebrated his achievement -- alongside co-winners Alessio Figalli, Peter Scholze and Akshay Venkatesh -- as a fairy tale come true for the often beleaguered Kurds. "I'm hoping this news will put a smile on the faces of those 40 million people," he said.

Born in a village in the ethnic Kurdish province of Marivan, near the Iran-Iraq border, Birkar said "Kurdistan was an unlikely place for a kid to develop an interest in mathematics."
Figalli, now 34 and at ETH Zurich, said the prize "gives automatic visibility and opens up doors to us." In addition to pursuing his own high-level research, he says encouraging young mathematicians "is something of a duty."
"There are an infinite number of problems," said Scholze, who is at the University of Bonn and is only 30 years old. "Whenever you solve a problem, there are 10 more coming."