ROGHAYEH REZAEI

IranWIre

Caucher Birkar still remembers staring at the portraits of Fields Medal winners on the walls at Tehran University, wondering if he’d ever meet such distinguished mathematicians.

The thought of becoming one himself seemed impossible for a young man who grew up on a subsistence farm in war-torn Kurdistan, where Iraqi artillery fire was a constant threat.

Yet in 2018, Birkar, then 40, became the second Iranian to receive the Fields Medal - mathematics’ highest honor, often called the Nobel Prize of math.

The recognition came for his groundbreaking work proving the boundedness of Fano varieties and advancing the minimal model program in algebraic geometry.

“To go from the point that I didn’t imagine meeting these people to the point where someday I hold a medal myself - I just couldn’t imagine that this would come true,” Birkar told Quanta Magazine.

Born Fereydoon Derakhshani in July 1978 in the village of Ney near Marivan, Iran, Birkar spent his childhood during the Iran–Iraq war. His hometown sat on the border, making it an easy target.

“My city is right on the border. You can imagine we were an easy target. The threat was always everywhere,” he said.

Life on the farm was traditional. The family of eight - Birkar had five siblings - produced everything they needed.

But his older brother Heydar recognized something special in young Fereydoon, teaching him integral calculus and advanced mathematics long before he encountered it in school.

“When I was 10, 11, 12 my brother helped me a lot to learn mathematics,” Birkar said. “Family helps enormously - directing, not pushing.”

After earning his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Tehran, where he won third place in the 2000 International Mathematics Competition for University Students, Birkar traveled to Britain for an academic competition.

Instead, he sought political asylum, citing violence against Kurds in Iran. He changed his name to Caucher Birkar - Kurdish for “migrant mathematician” - and began his doctorate at the University of Nottingham in 2001.

Despite the hardships of life as a new refugee, Birkar impressed quickly.

In 2003, the London Mathematical Society awarded him the Cecil King Travel Scholarship as the most promising PhD student.

He completed his doctorate in 2004 and eventually joined Cambridge University, where he became a professor.

The 2018 Fields Medal ceremony in Rio de Janeiro brought both triumph and tribulation.

Minutes after receiving his 14-carat gold medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Birkar’s briefcase was stolen from behind him as he stood accepting congratulations.

The medal, worth about $4,000, was never recovered.

But the International Mathematical Union had a spare display medal in Rio and awarded it to Birkar days later, making him the first person to receive the Fields Medal twice.

“This has been widely covered in the media, and now I am more famous than I would have been,” Birkar joked at the replacement ceremony. “And the number of people who know what a Fields Medal is is way more than it was last week.”

He added: “In the grand scheme of things this is a really, really small thing. I have seen much worse things in my life, and if I was discouraged by such small things I wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

In 2019, Prospect magazine named Birkar the world’s “Top Thinker” after tens of thousands voted in the publication’s annual poll.

He won by a landslide with more than half the votes, many from Kurdish supporters worldwide.

He said, “Kurdistan was an unlikely place for a kid to develop an interest in mathematics - I’m hoping that this news will put a smile on the faces of those 40 million people.”

Yet he’s careful to note that his strong Kurdish identity isn’t about nationalism or politics.

“Mathematics is part science, part art,” he told Prospect, explaining that he often works while listening to Kurdish classical music or Western classical composers.

His interests extend beyond equations to psychology, human history, natural history and music.

In his Cambridge office, Birkar keeps two photographs of Alexander Grothendieck, the German mathematician who fled the Nazis as a child - a reminder of their shared experience as refugees.

Birkar’s wife is from Thailand, and their son Zanko speaks Thai, Kurdish and English.

Birkar has made a point of teaching his son to speak Kurdish, posting photos on Instagram of his parents in traditional Kurdish dress and sharing images of himself playing piano and drums.

In 2021, Birkar joined Tsinghua University in Beijing as a professor at the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, while maintaining his honorary professorship at the University of Nottingham.

His accolades include the Leverhulme Prize (2010), the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris award (2010), the AMS Moore Prize (2016), and an honorary doctorate from Salahaddin University in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan (2019).

Birkar’s work focuses on birational geometry, a field that seeks to classify the infinite variety of polynomial equations into families with common characteristics.

His 2016 papers demonstrated that an infinite number of different polynomials can be defined by a finite number of characteristics.

Together with Paolo Cascini, Christopher Hacon and James McKernan, he settled several major conjectures, including the existence of log flips and minimal models for varieties of log general type.

His proof of the Borisov–Alexeev–Borisov conjecture on the boundedness of Fano varieties represented a breakthrough in the field.

“Mathematics is just another way of enjoying life,” Birkar has said.

He remains committed to helping disadvantaged students and mathematicians in developing countries access opportunities unavailable in their home nations.

“I really want to help people in less privileged locations and countries,” he said. “Especially in the case of Kurds.”