1. What was her role as a mathematician?
Maryam Mirzakhani is the first female and only Iranian to be honoured with the Fields Medal in 2014. The award recognised her for “her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.”
2. What was her journey like studying mathematics?
While a teenager, Maryam was a high achiever. In her high- school years, she won gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiads. She then continued to study for a BSc degree in mathematics from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehrān and five years later earned a PhD from Harvard University for her dissertation ‘Simple Geodesics on Hyperbolic Surfaces and Volume of the Moduli Space of Curves’. During this jorney and beyond, she was awarded numerous honours and awarded awarded the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics in San Diego in 2013.
She then carried out the role of a Mathematics Institute research fellow and an assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton University and later in 2008, she became a professor at Stanford University.
3. What was her greatest challenge?
In her early years of 1980 – 1988, despite the challenges of growing up in Tehran amidst the Iran-Iraq war, Maryam knew her limits weren’t bounded. She would continue to use her imagination and make up stories about a girl who achieved great things. This is where her true legacy began, where no challenges had restricted her and her willingness to thrive gave her wings to fly.
4. What did she enjoy other than maths?
As a kid, Maryam had a great passion for reading novels. It was not until her last year in high school that she began to form an interest to pursue mathematics but infact had dreamt of becoming a writer.
5. Her Legacy
Her attitude to maths was one filled with love. Very early in her years, before receiving the Fields Medal Award, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. However, that did not stop her. She continued working on mathematics as she thrived to produce not only results of great significance but further develop tools along the way that will be used by other researchers in the field as they continue to push forward.
At the age of 40, Maryam passed away in 2017 of breast cancer but her legacy lives on, breathing forward inspiration and passion in every young girls heart that they too can achieve success.
6. She has stated:
“I don't think that everyone should become a mathematician, but I do believe that many students don't give mathematics a real chance. I did poorly in math for a couple of years in middle school; I was just not interested in thinking about it. I can see that without being excited mathematics can look pointless and cold. The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.”