Caucher Birkar

Caucher Birkar is a UK-based Iranian Kurdish and British mathematician, born in Iran in July 1978, and a professor at Tsinghua University and an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham. He is an important contributor to modern birational geometry and was awarded the Fields Medal in 2018 for his proof of boundedness of Fano varieties and contributions to the minimal model program. Born on a subsistence farm in Marivan County, Kurdistan province, he studied at the University of Tehran, relocated to the UK as a refugee after winning third prize in the International Mathematics Competition for University Students in 2000, and was a PhD student at the University of Nottingham from 2001 to 2004. With Paolo Cascini, Christopher Hacon and James McKernan he settled several conjectures, including the existence of log flips and of minimal models for varieties of log general type.