The Foundations of Computational Mathematics (FoCM) society has chosen Eva Miranda, Full Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and affiliated researcher at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM), as the first recipient of the Agnes Szanto Medal. The award will be presented on 13 July 2026 during the eleventh FoCM conference, hosted by the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Vienna from 8 to 18 July.
The Szanto Medal is a new distinction within the international computational mathematics community. The FoCM society instituted it in 2023 in memory of Agnes Szanto, professor at North Carolina State University and former chair of the society. Szanto, who died in 2022 at the age of 55, was a leading figure in symbolic computation and a tireless organiser of the international computational mathematics community, having served the FoCM society as treasurer, board member, and chair from 2017 to 2020. The medal recognises mid-career scientists whose work has produced significant contributions to computational mathematics and who have shown sustained service and leadership within the community. It will be awarded every three years in conjunction with each FoCM conference, with this 2026 edition marking its inaugural ceremony.
Miranda’s response to the news began with Szanto rather than with the medal. “It is a deep honour and also a very special responsibility,” she says. “Agnes Szanto was a figure who understood science not only as an accumulation of results, but as a living, shared activity, with a strong commitment to the community. To be the first person to receive a medal that bears her name, and that recognises precisely this dual aspect, research and collective involvement, has a very intimate meaning for me.” She frames the award as an impulse to keep contributing, “with ideas but also with projects, collaborations and new generations, to a scientific community that, like the one Agnes Szanto helped build, aspires to be demanding and generous at the same time.”
Miranda’s research sits at the crossroads of differential geometry, mathematical physics, and theoretical computer science. She has worked extensively on symplectic and Poisson geometry and on integrable systems, with more recent attention to the singular geometric structures that arise in celestial mechanics. Over the last few years, she has opened a new line of research where geometry meets computability. With Robert Cardona, Daniel Peralta-Salas, and Francisco Presas, she proved that fluid trajectories governed by Euler’s equations can be used to perform universal computation, and that a single fluid can host trajectories whose long-term behaviour no algorithm can decide. More recent work, accepted in PNAS Nexus, extends the result to the Navier-Stokes equations. From these results, Miranda has gone on to develop Topological Kleene Field Theory, a computational model that brings together topology, geometry, and ideas from mathematical logic to identify structural barriers to prediction in fluid dynamics and celestial mechanics.
“After receiving distinctions such as those of Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Godfrey Harold Hardy or François Deruyts, I felt that I was missing, and I say this with all sincerity, a recognition that bears a woman’s name.”
Beyond her research, Miranda has been an active builder of the scientific community. She directs the Laboratory of Geometry and Dynamical Systems at UPC, leads the GEOMVAP research group, and co-founded the SYMCREA excellence hub. She has served on numerous international scientific committees and editorial boards. Her commitment to public engagement has run in parallel, through interviews, the CASIO #científicasCASIO campaign, and a children’s book about her work published by ApoloKIDS.
The Szanto Medal joins a long list of recognitions in Miranda’s career. She has twice been awarded the ICREA Acadèmia prize from the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies. Her distinctions also include a Chair of Excellence from the Fondation sciences mathématiques de Paris, the Bessel Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the François Deruyts Prize from the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences, the 2023 Hardy Lectureship of the London Mathematical Society, and a Gauss Professorship at the Niedersächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen.
“It is not only a symbolic matter,” Miranda adds. “Behind women’s names there are often profound histories, trajectories full of nuance, and, too often, stories that have not been told enough. Receiving a medal linked to Agnes Szanto connects with that more invisible dimension of science: memory, the voices that have opened paths and that we are still rediscovering today. That is why this recognition has a special resonance for me. It not only celebrates a trajectory, but it also helps present a feminine scientific genealogy that deserves to be much more visible, narrated and more celebrated.”
The FoCM 2026 conference in Vienna will be the eleventh edition of the society’s flagship gathering, held every three years since 1995. The day after the medal ceremony, the City of Vienna will host a reception at the City Hall, attended by the mayor, where Miranda will give a thirty-minute talk titled Found in translation.
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For a recent profile of Miranda’s research and travels in the second half of 2025, including her Nachdiplom Lectures at ETH Zürich, her plenary at the International Congress of Basic Science in Beijing, and her panel at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, see A Semester of Mathematics across Two Continents.
