Refugee wins 'Nobel of mathematics'

RIO DE JANEIRO - Kurdish refugee turned Cambridge University math professor Caucher Birkar was among four winners on Wednesday of the prestigious Fields prize, dubbed the Nobel for mathematics, but had his gold medal stolen minutes later.

It was an embarrassing debut for Brazil's Rio de Janeiro, the first city in the southern hemisphere to host the Fields ceremony, which takes place every four years.

Less than an hour had passed since Birkar, a 40-year-old specialist in algebraic geometry, had been handed his 14-karat gold medal when his briefcase went missing. The organizer behind the event, the International Congress of Mathematics, said it "profoundly regrets" the incident.