The field medal for the year 2014 for mathematics goes to an Indian, Iranian named Manjul Bhargava which is widely considered as a Nobel Prize. He was the hot favorite in pre award polls among the peers.

The cowinner for the award is Mirzakhani an Iranian female who teaches at Stanford University and it is the first time that a female has won the award, all the previous 52 winners were men.

€Mirzakhani award will encourage more women to come in Mathematics field and it is symbolic of women empowerment€ Ingrid Daubechies said in a statement in fact she herself is the first president of the International Mathematics Union.

The two other winners are Artur Avila from Brazil and Martin Hairer from Austria. Avila is also the first Brazilian and Latin American to win the medal.

These medals are awarded every year to mathematicians under the age of 40 years at the International Congress of the international Mathematical Union and the presentation will take place in Seoul on Wednesday at the quadrennial IMU Congress.

Although the prize money is 15000$ which is 1/100 compared to the Noble prize, the award long dominated by Americans, Russians, Britons and French is the highest honour in the field of Mathematics.

Canadian Mathematician John Charles Field instituted it when it felt that there was no bigger honour for Mathematics. The Nobel Prize is given in the field of literature, Peace, economics, physiology or medicine, Chemistry and Physics but not for Mathematics.

The fact that Maths was not included in the list of subjects for Noble prize because it was not considered as a practical science which can benefit any body. But today it is a different story as it is used everywhere from the airline scheduling to the Internet security. Bhargava PhD thesis for instance, has helped in the €determination of asymptotic density of discriminants of quartic and quintic number field€.

Although a Canadian American who was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Bhargava is not a stranger to India and Indian Mathematician in fact, her mother who is Indian American teaches at the Hofstra University.

Bhargava was awarded the 2012 Infosys prize in Mathematics for his extraordinary work in the algebric number theory which has revolutionized the way in which the number field and the elliptic curves are counted.

Last week a speculation heated up that who would be the 2014 field medal winners, an online poll put Bhargava on the top with 516 votes, with Avila coming second with 486 votes. It does not come to a surprise as within a span of two years he becomes professor after graduation.