Special talk by Caroline Series about "Mirzakhani’s starting point"

Caroline Series (Warwick University)
Mirzakhani’s starting point
13 May 2025 | 16:00 - 17:00 | HG F3

Abstract
In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani of Stanford University became the first women to be awarded the Fields medal. The starting point of her work was a remarkable relationship called McShane’s identity, about the lengths of simple closed curves on certain hyperbolic surfaces. The proof of this identity, including the Birman-Series theorem about simple curves on surfaces, uses only quite basic ideas in hyperbolic geometry which I will try to explain. We will then look briefly at Mirzakhani’s ingenious way of exploiting the identity and where it led.