Caucher Birkar born Fereydoun Derakhshani (July 1978) is a China-based Kurdish mathematician and a professor at Tsinghua University  and University of Cambridge.

Birkar is an important contributor to modern birational geometry. In 2010 he received the Leverhulme Prize in mathematics and statistics for his contributions to algebraic geometry,  and in 2016, the AMS Moore Prize for the article "Existence of minimal models for varieties of log general type", Journal of the AMS (2010) (joint with P. Cascini, C. Hacon and J. McKernan).  He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2018, "for his proof of boundedness of Fano varieties and contributions to the minimal model program". His favorite mathematician is Alexander Grothendieck. In his office at the University of Cambridge, Birkar has two photographs of Grothendieck, who was a refugee and a Fields medalist, just like Birkar.

Awards and honours

2010 Leverhulme Prize in mathematics and statistics for "his outstanding contributions to fundamental research in algebraic geometry"

2010 Prize of the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris

2016 AMS Moore Prize

2018 Fields Medal

2019 Honorary Doctorate of the Salahuddin University, Erbil