i know way too little to say anything about what birkar did, but i can ramble a tiny bit about birational geometry..
roughly speaking the goal of birational geometry (birkar's field) is to classify varieties birationally.
as a very basic example of a classification result in geometry/topology is the classification of closed orientable surfaces - where such surfaces are determined by the number of holes they have (genus).
varieties are zero loci of polynomials. e.g. take your favourite polynomial (e.g. $y^2=x(x^2-1)$, and look at its zero locus in $\mathbb{C}^2$).