Congrats to Maryam Mirzakhani, who is the first woman to win the Fields Medal! Basically the Nobel Prize of mathematics, the honor has gone to 56 men since it began back to 1936.

Born and raised in Iran, Mirzakhani studied at Harvard (ironically, President Larry Summers made his infamous comments about how women are naturally bad at math just a year after she finished her degree) and is now a professor at Stanford who works on “the geometry of moduli space, a complex geometric and algebraic entity that might be described as a universe in which every point is itself a universe,” which I’m sure would sound even more impressive if I understood what it meant. At her girls high ...