Thinkers Timeline

Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī was a Persian scholar born around 780, probably in Khwarezm, a region in what is now Uzbekistan. His family name, al-Khwārizmī, means 'from Khwarezm'. He spent most of his working life in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. Baghdad at that time was one of the world's great centres of learning. He worked at the House of Wisdom, a famous library and research centre set up by the Caliph al-Ma'mūn. Scholars there translated Greek, Persian, and Indian texts into Arabic and wrote original works of their own. Al-Khwārizmī was one of the most important scholars of his generation. He wrote on mathematics, astronomy, geography, and the calendar. His most famous book is usually called al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa'l-muqābala, or The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. The word al-jabr in the title gave us the English word algebra. Another of his books explained how to calculate using the Hindu numerals from India. This book, translated into Latin centuries later, spread these numerals across Europe. We call them Arabic numerals today, but they came from India through scholars like him. He died around 850. Many of his works survive. Some exist only in later Latin translations. His influence on mathematics is hard to overstate.

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.