Scimago Institutions Rankings, a science evaluation source to assess worldwide universities and research-focused institutions, has released the data of the Middle Eastern countries’ ranking in 2017.
Based on the report, Iran ranks first in the Middle East region in applied mathematics with 1,528 documents, 1,475 citable documents and 626 citations in the international papers.
The report added that Iran has outpaced Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel (Occupied Palestine), Egypt, the UAE, Jordan, Qatar, Iraq, Lebanon, Oman, Kuwait, Palestine, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain in applied mathematics in the Middle East in 2017.
Since old times in history and specially after the advent of Islam, Iranians have always played a significant role in the world of mathematics and related fields from Abu Reihan Birouni who was a Persian Muslim scholar and polymath of the 11th century to Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman and first Iranian to win the Fields Medal, often described as the equivalent of a Nobel prize for mathematicians.
Born in Tehran, Mirzakhani studied mathematics at Sharif University of Technology there before coming to the US to get a PhD at Harvard University in 2004.
Mirzakhani worked on a variety of problems related to hyperbolic geometry, which describes surfaces that are curved like a Pringles potato chip or the curly ends of a leaf of kale. Unlike chips or vegetables, however, these surfaces close up like donuts, usually with multiple holes. If that is hard to visualize, there’s good reason: The surfaces Mirzakhani studied were not bound by the constraints of the real world.
On 14 July 2017, Mirzakhani died of breast cancer at the age of 40.
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