Math in the Media: Finally!! A female Fields Medalist....

Well, I am back and in time for a new semester here at Hopkins.  And I am back with some very nice news. 

The next recipients of one of our field's top honors, the Fields Medal, includes Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian born mathematician at Stanford University.  She is a dynamicist (a mathematician whose field of study is dynamical systems) and the first woman to receive this prize since its inception in 1936.  She shares the prize this year (the prize is given out every four years) with three other mathematicians, listed in this article in the New York Times, 

Top Math Prize Has Its First Female Winner.

And while there should be nothing special about a woman receiving the prize (math is hardly a gender-specific endeavor), I do have sort of a glass-ceiling-breaking-moment feeling here.  Congratulations, Professor and Professors!  Here's to more outstanding math research.

And here is another nice write up of this event and her contributions to mathematics.

Definition - Dynamical Systems

This post will be a part of a series, marked by the tag "Dynamical Systems", in which I will offer thoughts on the nature of Dynamical Systems as a mathematical discipline.

Today I will briefly give my definition of the study, and stop there.

Definition: Dynamical Systems is the formal study of the properties of mathematical objects by studying how those objects behave under transformations.

Usually the types of transformations involved are defined in one of two ways:

• By a continuous variable (like differential equations, where time is viewed as an action by the real numbers on the space of solutions of the ODEs, and the dynamical systems in this category are called flows), or
• by a discrete variable (think of the behavior of points of a space under the repeated application of a single map from the space to itself. This is viewed as an integer action on the domain of the function, where each integer n is associated to the map given by the n-times composition of the function with itself).

This definition encompasses a very broad interpretation of DS, and reflects its use in so many areas of mathematics, from algebra and analysis, to probability and statistics, to topology and geometry, to number theory.

It is also my favorite....