News

International Women in Mathematics Day is celebrated on 12 May, marking the birthday of Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to receive the Fields Medal in 2014. Born in Iran, Mirzakhani made groundbreaking contributions to mathematics before her life was cut short at a young age. Her legacy continues to inspire women and underrepresented groups in mathematics worldwide.

This International Women in Mathematics Day we spotlight the research profile of two female colleagues in the School of Mathematical Sciences: Professor Ginestra Bianconi and Dr Miriam Norris.

Ginestra Bianconi is Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Centre for Complex Systems. She is Fellow of the American Physical Society and member of the European Academy of Sciences for her work on statistical mechanics .
In 2025, she was awarded the Euler Prize by the Network Science Society for her pioneering contributions revealing the interplay between the topology of networks and their dynamics. She is the author of the monograph Higher-Order Networks: An Introduction to Simplicial Complexes (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Her current research focuses on the establishing the deep mathematical relation between geometry, topology, and dynamics on higher-order networks. She uses algebraic topology to define the dynamical state of simplicial complexes, revealing new collective phenomena relevant to complex systems and theoretical physics.
Over the past five years, she has promoted the use of the Topological Dirac operator to characterize the interplay between topology, geometry, and dynamics, and to explore its role in theoretical physics and dynamical systems.
More recently, she has opened a new research direction in quantum gravity with the formulation of the Gravity from Entropy (GfE) approach which proposes an entropic action from gravity. You can read about this work here.

Miriam Norris is a senior Heilbronn Research Fellow in the Centre for Combinatorics Algebra and Number Theory. Miriam's research is devoted to representation theory in the intersection between algebra and number theory. She is currently working with Dr Shu Sasaki on aspects of representation theory involved in the Langlands programme. Miriam returned to London from a postdoc in Manchester in October 2025 having done her PhD within the London School of Geometry and Number Theory. Outside of maths she really enjoys hiking and cycling around the city, particularly over London's bridges!