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Maryam Mirzajani : "You have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty of math."

By lauruiz

  • Born

    Born
    Mirzakhani was born on 3 May 1977 in Tehran, Iran. Her father Ahmad is an electrical engineer.

  • Childhood Education

    Childhood Education
    She attended Tehran Farzanegan School, part of the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents (NODET).

  • High-school education

    High-school education
    In 1994, Mirzakhani achieved the gold medal level in the International Mathematical Olympiad, the first female Iranian student to do so. And in the 1995 International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score and to win two gold medals.

  • Degree

    Degree
    In 1999 she received a B.Sc. degree in mathematics from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehrān.

  • PhD

    PhD
    In 2004 she earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University for her dissertation Simple Geodesics on Hyperbolic Surfaces and Volume of the Moduli Space of Curves. She worked at Harvard under the supervision of the Fields Medalist Curtis T. McMullen.

  • Personal life

    Personal life
    In 2005, Mirzakhani married Jan Vondrák, a Czech theoretical computer scientist and applied mathematician who currently is an associate professor at Stanford University. They had a daughter named Anahita. And they lived in Palo Alto, California.

  • Work

    Work
    Mirzakhani was a 2004 research fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute and a professor at Princeton University. And in 2008, she became a professor at Stanford University.

  • Research work

    Research work
    Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014 for "her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces". The award was made in Seoul at the International Congress of Mathematicians on 13 August.

  • Death

    Death
    Mirzakhani was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. In 2016, the cancer spread to her bones and liver, and she died in 2017 at the age of 40 at Stanford Hospital in Stanford, California. Upon her death, several Iranian newspapers, along with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, broke taboo and published photographs of Mirzakhani with her hair uncovered, a gesture that was widely noted in the press and on social media as a reminder of one of the most important mathematics in our world.