In the world, there have been only 5 women who have won the highest mathematics prize in the past 90 years

Prestigious mathematics awards such as the Fields Medal, Abel Prize and Breakthrough Prize are awarded mainly to men .

French mathematician Claire Voisin , of the French Academy of Sciences, has just been announced as the first woman to win the 2024 Crafoord Prize in mathematics - one of the prestigious prizes in mathematics and will be awarded in May along with the Nobel Prize, according to the journal Nature .

The Crafoord Prize - founded in 1980 by a Swedish industrialist and administered by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences - is awarded in four fields: Astronomy, mathematics, geology and biology. These sciences were chosen to complement those already awarded in the Nobel Prizes.

Ms. Maryam Mirzakhani (right), who passed away in 2017, was the first woman to win the Fields Medal - (Photo: ALAMY).

Of the 217 mathematics prizes awarded, there have only been 5 women

Ms. Voisin is one of five women to win top mathematics prizes in the past 90 years.

The women's win highlights an ongoing problem in mathematics: the lack of gender diversity among winners of the field's most prestigious prizes.

Six of the world's top mathematics prizes - the Fields Medal and the Abel, Shaw, Wolf, Crafoord and Breakthrough prizes - have been awarded a total of 217 times, but only seven have been awarded to women.

Two women - Ms. Voisin and Ms. Maryam Mirzakhani - each won two of those awards.

Ms. Voisin won another Shaw Award in 2017.

Ms. Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal in 2014 and was posthumously awarded the Breakthrough Prize in 2020, primarily for her theoretical work in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces.

In 2023, physicist and mathematician Ingrid Daubechies - who is famous for her use of wavelets in image compression - received the Wolf Prize.

Ms. Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck won the 2019 Abel Prize for her pioneering efforts in modern geometric analysis.

And number theorist Maryna Viazovska won the Fields Medal in 2022.

Gender gap

The International Mathematical Union (IMU), a global body promoting cooperation in mathematics, has member organizations in more than 80 countries. However, the organization does not keep statistics on member demographics.

According to a 2018 survey by the Annual Survey of Mathematics and Statistics (AMS), women account for 25% to 30% of mathematics PhDs in the US.

Carolina Araujo, chair of IMU's Women in Mathematics Committee, said: 'Despite growing awareness of the gender gap and important advances in recent years, some aspects remain constant'.

According to Ms. Araujo, statistics show that although the proportion of female authors writing scientific articles on mathematics has increased steadily over the past decades, the proportion of female authors in leading mathematics journals remains low. level below 10%.