Ipsita Datta Awarded Mirzakhani Fellowship

The Stanford Mathematics Department is pleased to announce that Ipsita Datta is awarded the Maryam Mirzakhani Graduate Fellowship for 2020-21. This fellowship was established in memory of our former colleague, Professor Maryam Mirzakhani, allowing us to attract outstanding students and develop the next generation of world leaders in mathematics.

Ipsita works in symplectic geometry with Professor Yasha Eliashberg. She was originally drawn toward mathematics that she could visualize, and geometry is a great fit. She is interested in understanding and characterizing families of J-holomorphic disks embedded in 4-dimensional spaces. Such families can give a lot of information about the space they live in and about other surfaces in the space. She hopes to better understand a specific type of surface known as immersed lagrangians. It is sort of like asking the question: if I tell you about every possible way a soap film could form inside a particular plastic straw, would you be able to draw the plastic straw? 

Ipsitta is also one of the organizers fo the Stanford Women in Math Mentoring (SWIMM) and the Noetherian Ring. 

Maryam Mirzakhani joined Stanford as a Professor of Mathematics in 2009. She made dramatic advances in our understanding of the geometry and dynamics of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces. Mirzakhani received the 2013 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, the Clay Research Award in 2014 and the Fields Medal in 2014. She was also elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Maryam’s passion for mathematics and pursuing deep, challenging questions will continue to inspire future generations of mathematicians, and Stanford Mathematics is proud to continue her legacy.