Maryam Mirzakhani, the magician of surfaces
---------------------------------------------
Maryam Mirzakhani's career (1977–2017) was marked by one major achievement after another. The documentary Secrets of the Surface: The Mathematical Vision of Maryam Mirzakhani (Georges Csicsery, 2020) traces her journey through accounts from many friends, teachers and colleagues. They all portray a mind as brilliant as it was modest, an ever-enthusiastic mathematician who loved tackling extremely difficult problems. In her field—the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces—her contributions are considered among the most important of recent decades. Maryam Mirzakhani died of cancer at the age of 40, leaving a scientific legacy that holds great promise. The first woman to receive the Fields Medal, she also remains a role model and symbol for many women wishing to pursue careers in mathematics. As Cumrun Vafa, a physicist at Harvard University, puts it: "Maryam's example shows that the quest for knowledge is a timeless adventure, unbounded by geography or gender."
Aline Bonami, winner of the 2020 Bergman Prize
-------------------------------
Aline Bonami has been a professor at the Université d'Orléans (Loiret) since 1973. In 1994, she founded MAPMO there, a mathematics research laboratory that became the Institut Denis-Poisson in 2018 after merging with the laboratory in Tours (Indre-et-Loire). She was president of the Société mathématique de France in 2012–2013.
An expert in harmonic analysis and complex analysis in several variables, Aline Bonami has just received the prestigious Stefan Bergman Prize from the American Mathematical Society. The prize recognizes her foundational work on the Bergman and Szegő projections and the associated spaces of holomorphic functions.
