Thinkers Timeline

Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician. She was the first woman ever to win the Fields Medal, the highest prize in mathematics. She was born in 1977 in Tehran, the capital of Iran. She grew up during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a difficult time for the country. Her parents encouraged her education despite the surrounding chaos. She was not interested in mathematics as a young child. She wanted to be a writer. She read novels constantly and dreamed of becoming a novelist. Her interest in maths grew slowly through middle school. By high school she was attending a special school for gifted girls in Tehran. She and her best friend Roya Beheshti became famous for being the first Iranian girls to win medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Mirzakhani won gold medals in 1994 and 1995, with a perfect score the second year. She studied mathematics at Sharif University in Tehran. In 1999 she went to the United States for graduate school at Harvard. She was supervised by Curtis McMullen, a Fields Medallist himself. Her doctoral work was already remarkable. She found new ways to count certain kinds of curves on curved surfaces. She continued at Princeton and then at Stanford as a professor. In 2014, aged 37, she became the first woman to win the Fields Medal. The medal is awarded only every four years and only to mathematicians under 40. The same year she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The cancer eventually spread to her bones and liver. She died in 2017, aged just 40. She left behind her husband and her young daughter Anahita.