Maggie Miller and Jinyoung Park Were Awarded The Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize 2023

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation has announced the winners of its 2023 prizes, recognizing scholars in three categories majorly, including fundamental physics, mathematics, and life sciences. 

Founded by Sergey Brin; Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg; Julia and Yuri Milner; and Anne Wojcicki, who have financially supported the foundation and its awards since their inception more than a decade ago, this prestigious award is often termed the “Oscars of science” and every winner gets $3 million each. 

This year, Stanford mathematicians Maggie Miller and Jinyoung Park have been awarded the 2023 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. 

The $50,000 prize is awarded to outstanding early-career women in the field of mathematics. The award is named for Iranian mathematician, Fields Medalist, and Stanford Professor Maryam Mirzakhani, who died of breast cancer in 2017.

This year, Miller and Park share the prize with Vera Traub from the University of Bonn. Miller, a visiting Clay Research Fellow at Stanford and a Stanford Science Fellow work on geometric topology – the study of properties that are preserved in a shape as it deforms, stretches, or twists. Miller was awarded the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize for “work on fibered ribbon knots and surfaces in 4-dimensional manifolds.” 

“I was grateful to be considered for the award and proud to be one of the recipients,” said Miller. “This prize is given to early-career women mathematicians on the merit of their research; I’m so excited to be in this group of women and look forward to seeing more developments in mathematics by women researchers in the future.”

Park, who also won this award, is the Szegö Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. She was awarded Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize for “contributions to the resolution of several major conjectures on thresholds and selector processes”. Her research interests fall within the field of discrete mathematics, which covers mathematical structures that are distinct and separable, and often countable. Park’s interests are extremal and probabilistic combinatorics, asymptotic enumeration, and graph theory.

“I’m extremely honored to receive this prize, and I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all of my collaborators,” said Park. “I’m particularly grateful to my academic advisor Jeff Kahn, and my postdoc mentors Jacob Fox and Avi Wigderson for their guidance and support. I also would like to thank my husband and daughter for their love and support.”

Apart from the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, the Breakthrough Foundation also awards the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics annually, as well as three $100,000 New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes for researchers in the first decade of their professional careers. The Breakthrough Prizes also recognize researchers in physics and life sciences. 

Credits: Stanford Report

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