Maryam Mirzakhani

Biography

Maryam Mirzakhani (1977–2017), born in Tehran, was a mathematician who in 2014 became the first woman — and the first Iranian — to receive the Fields Medal, mathematics' highest international honor. As a teenager she won two gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad, studied at Sharif University of Technology, earned her PhD at Harvard, and became a professor at Stanford. Her research lay in the geometry and dynamics of Riemann surfaces, moduli spaces, and the behavior of billiard trajectories in polygons — deep, abstract, and highly creative work that connected diverse areas of mathematics. She died of cancer in 2017 at the age of forty. A notable nuance is that after her death her image became a national and inspirational symbol — especially for girls and women in science — though some have cautioned that overemphasizing 'first woman' status can obscure the depth of her purely mathematical achievement.

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Related entities

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Maryam Mirzakhani"
• International Mathematical Union, Fields Medal citation (2014)
• Quanta Magazine / Stanford University obituaries (2017)