Meet the five women to win mathematics' biggest prizes in 90 years

Six of the world's top mathematics honors, the Fields Medal and the Abel, Shaw, Wolf, Crafoord and Breakthrough Prizes, have been awarded a combined 217 times in the past 90 years, but only seven of those awards have gone to women, according to Nature magazine.

Two mathematicians account for four of those seven honors. French mathematician Claire Voisin won the Shaw Prize in 2017 and the Crafoord Prize in 2024, while Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to receive the Fields Medal in 2014 and was posthumously awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2020.

The remaining three female recipients are Belgian mathematician Ingrid Daubechies, who received the Wolf Prize in 2023 for her pioneering work on wavelets; American mathematician Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck, who became the first woman to win the Abel Prize in 2019; and Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska, who won the Fields Medal in 2022.

"The awards are one mechanism by which work and thinkers are promoted in the broader community," Kathryn Leonard, an American mathematician and former president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, told Nature. "If women and people from other excluded groups continue to be excluded, their work is not being celebrated and shared."

Here are the five women behind those historic achievements.

Claire Voisin

French mathematician Claire Voisin. Photo couirtesy of Institute of Mathematical Sciences

Voisin became the first woman to receive the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics on Jan. 30, 2024. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored her "for outstanding contributions to complex and algebraic geometry, including Hodge theory, algebraic cycles, and hyperkähler geometry."

Seven years earlier, she shared the 2017 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences with Janos Kollar, professor of mathematics at Princeton University, for "their remarkable results in many central areas of algebraic geometry, which have transformed the field and led to the solution of long-standing problems that had appeared out of reach," according to the Shaw Prize Foundation.

Established by late Hong Kong media mogul Run Run Shaw, the Shaw Prize has been awarded annually since 2004 for outstanding achievements in astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences. Each prize includes a medal, a certificate and $1.2 million.

Born in the northern suburbs of Paris in 1962, Voisin developed a passion for mathematics as a child with encouragement from her father. By age 12, she had become fascinated by algebra and the way abstract reasoning could explain concrete problems.

"It was wonderful to understand so fully how things work," she said in a UNESCO interview after being named a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science laureate in 2019.

Voisin specializes in algebraic geometry, a branch of mathematics that studies geometric shapes through algebraic equations. While highly theoretical, the field has broad applications across modern mathematics and theoretical physics. She has often described mathematical discovery as a creative pursuit. As she told France's CNRS Le Journal in 2016, "I wouldn't actually call myself an artist but it's true you need to be creative to be good at mathematics".

Voisin became the first woman mathematician appointed to France's Collège de France, one of the country's most prestigious academic institutions. She is also a member of the Académie des Sciences and one of only five women to receive the French National Centre for Scientific Research Gold Medal, the country's highest scientific honor.

Although she has said she did not personally experience gender discrimination during her career, Voisin believes many women scientists continue to receive less recognition than their male colleagues. "I think women have to make more effort than men, in particular at the beginning of their career, in order to be considered as serious researchers."

She has argued that women in mathematics are too often treated as a minority rather than "scientists among scientists." She also described the shortage of women in research as "a significant loss for science." As a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science laureate, Voisin said she hoped the recognition would encourage more young women to pursue mathematics, including pure mathematics.

Maryam Mirzakhani

Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani. Photo courtesy of Stanford University

Mirzakhani made history in 2014 by becoming the first woman and the first Iranian to receive the Fields Medal, ending nearly 80 years of all-male winners.

Often regarded as mathematics' highest honor for young researchers, the Fields Medal is awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union to as many as four mathematicians under the age of 40. Before Mirzakhani's victory, all 52 recipients had been men.

She received the medal for her groundbreaking work on the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces. Her research explored the geometry and behavior of curved surfaces, advancing knowledge in pure mathematics while also influencing theoretical physics and quantum field theory.

"It was bound to happen," Ingrid Daubechies, first woman president of the IMU, told Scientific American in 2017. "There are excellent young women mathematicians. Many times they have been on the short, short list, but it had so far not happened. I was very, very happy that it happened on my watch."

Born in Tehran on May 3, 1977, Mirzakhani originally hoped to become a writer before discovering her passion for mathematics during high school. She won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1994 and 1995, earning a perfect score in her second appearance.

After graduating from Sharif University of Technology, she completed her doctorate at Harvard University, U.S., where she produced pioneering research in geometry. She later joined the faculty at Princeton University before moving to Stanford University in 2008.

Known for tackling some of mathematics' most difficult problems with remarkable patience, Mirzakhani became one of the world's leading geometers. Her work transformed understanding of geometric structures and curved spaces and opened new directions for future research.

She continued working until shortly before her death from cancer on July 17, 2017, at the age of 40. She was survived by her husband, Jan Vondrák, and their daughter, Anahita.

In 2020, she was posthumously awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for her theoretical work on the geometry and symmetry of curved surfaces. The Breakthrough Prize honors leading scientists worldwide, with each prize valued at $3 million across life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics.

Karen Uhlenbeck

American mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck. Photo courtesy of the U.S.'s Institute for Advanced Study

Uhlenbeck became the first and, so far, only woman to receive the Abel Prize in 2019, earning one of mathematics' highest honors for research that transformed both mathematics and theoretical physics.

Often described as mathematics' equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the Abel Prize recognized Uhlenbeck "for her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics," according to the Abel Prize committee.

Hans Munthe-Kaas, chair of the Abel Prize committee, said her research had "dramatically changed the mathematical landscape."

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., in 1942, Uhlenbeck developed a love of reading as a child, an interest that gradually led her toward science and mathematics. She studied at New York University's Courant Institute before earning her doctorate from Brandeis University in 1968.

Despite her academic achievements, she encountered widespread discrimination early in her career.

After completing her Ph.D., she taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, but struggled to secure a permanent faculty position, according to the National Science and Technology Medals Foundation.

She recalled being told "that people didn’t hire women, that women were supposed to go home and have babies." "So the places interested in my husband — MIT, Stanford, and Princeton — were not interested in hiring me," she said.

Uhlenbeck nevertheless built one of the most influential careers in modern mathematics. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1983 and joined the University of Texas at Austin as a professor in 1987, where she remained for more than three decades.

Beyond her research, she has become a leading advocate for women in mathematics. She has helped establish programs supporting female mathematicians and has encouraged young people, particularly women, to pursue careers in science and mathematics.

Maryna Viazovska

Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska. Photo courtesy of EPFL

Viazovska became the second woman to receive the Fields Medal on July 5, 2022, at age 37, during a ceremony at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. "I feel sad that I’m only the second woman," Viazovska said in a statement. "But why is that? I don’t know. I hope it will change in the future."

A specialist in number theory, Viazovska was honored for solving the sphere-packing problem in eight and 24 dimensions, showing the most efficient way to arrange spheres in space. The puzzle had remained unsolved for more than 400 years.

Mathematician Henry Cohn, who delivered the International Congress of Mathematicians lecture celebrating her work, said Viazovska "manages to do things that are completely non-obvious that lots of people tried and failed to do," adding that she achieves them by "uncovering very simple, natural, profound structures, things that nobody expected and that nobody else had been able to find."

Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Dec. 2, 1984, Viazovska developed an interest in mathematics at an early age.

"I've liked mathematics since my schooldays," she said in a 2022 interview with the Swiss research institute École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). "It always seemed like the most straightforward subject."

She earned her bachelor's degree from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv before completing a master's degree in Germany and a doctorate at the University of Bonn in 2013. She later joined EPFL, becoming a full professor at the age of 33.

Viazovska has often described mathematics as both visual and intuitive.

"Studying pure mathematics is bit like reading a book with illustrations," she said in a 2022 interview with EPFL. "The images are linked to the text, but they don’t match the written word exactly."

She said solving mathematical problems felt like "doing a jigsaw puzzle," with abstract ideas helping her connect concepts and uncover practical applications.

Ingrid Daubechies

Belgian mathematician and physicist Ingrid Daubechies, the first woman president of the International Mathematical Union. Photo courtesy of The World Academy of Sciences

Daubechies became one of the few women to receive one of mathematics' highest honors when she won the Wolf Prize in 2023 for work that transformed modern image and signal processing.

The Wolf Foundation recognized her "for work in wavelet theory and applied harmonic analysis." Established in 1978, the Wolf Prize is among the world's most prestigious scientific awards and includes a $100,000 prize.

Daubechies is best known for developing mathematical wavelets, tools that allow digital information to be analyzed, compressed and reconstructed more efficiently. Her work has had a lasting impact on technologies including medical imaging, image compression, remote sensing and digital photography.

The Wolf Foundation also credited her with applying harmonic analysis to fields beyond mathematics, including art conservation and evolutionary biology.

Born in Belgium, Daubechies earned a bachelor's degree in physics from the Free University of Brussels in 1975 before completing a doctorate there. Her doctoral research focused on the mathematical representation of quantum mechanical operators.

Her fascination with mathematics began in childhood. Encouraged by her father, she developed an early curiosity about how machines worked and why mathematical patterns governed the world around her. She later recalled calculating large numbers in her head while trying to fall asleep simply because she found the exercise fascinating.

Her work on wavelet theory fundamentally changed the way digital images and signals are processed. The mathematical techniques she helped develop are now widely used to compress data, improve medical imaging, reconstruct images captured by telescopes, detect forged documents and fingerprints, support wireless communications and encode digital audio files such as MP3s.

Beyond her research, Daubechies has been a strong advocate for expanding opportunities in mathematics and science, particularly for women and researchers in developing countries. During her tenure as president of the IMU, she promoted greater access to mathematics education and worked to encourage more young women to pursue scientific careers.