Maryam Mirzakhani
First woman to win the Fields Medal – the ‘Nobel’ of Maths
MARYAM MIRZAKHANI, who has died of breast cancer aged 40, became, in 2014, the first woman ever to win the Fields Medal – known as the “Nobel Prize of mathematics” – in recognition of her contributions to the understanding of the symmetry of curved surfaces.
Even more remarkable, her mathematical genius was first nurtured in post-revolutionary Iran and she herself confessed to having been something of a duffer in the subject for several years at school.
Maryam Mirzakhani’s research involved pure mathematics of staggering complexity. According to the Fields Medal citation, she won the prize for her “outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”.
In an account designed to be slightly more accessible to a lay audience, the American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg explained her research in terms of the game of billiards: “She considers not just one billiard table, but the universe of all possible billiard tables. And the kind of dynamics she studies doesn’t directly concern the motion of the billiards on the table, but instead a transformation of the billiard table itself, which is changing its shape in a rule-governed way … This isn’t the kind of thing you do to win at pool, but it’s the kind of thing you do to win a Fields Medal.”
Maryam Mirzakhani was born in Tehran on May 3 1977, two years before the revolution that ushered in an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini. Her father was an engineer. She became fascinated by the beauty of mathematics after her older brother told her about a trick, devised in the 18th century by the German child prodigy Carl Gauss, to work out the sum of all the numbers from one to 100. (The answer is 5,050 and the trick is to look at pairs that add up to 101.)
But at first she had dreams of becoming a writer, and in fact she did poorly at maths for several years because her teacher thought she had no talent for it. “It’s so important what others see in you. I lost my interest in math,” she recalled.
At high school her aptitude for solving problems and working on proofs was noticed by her headmistress, a strongwilled character who made every effort to ensure her students had the same opportunities as boys. Maryam Mirzakhani went on to win gold medals at both the 1994 and 1995 International Mathematics Olympiads, finishing with a perfect score in the second.
In America, where she moved in 1999, some were surprised that she had been able to take a degree at Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology. But, as she recalled, “the education system in Iran is not the way people might imagine here. As a graduate student at Harvard, I had to explain quite a few times that I was allowed to attend a university as a woman in Iran.” In fact, women outnumber men in Iranian universities.
After completing a doctorate at Harvard under Curtis Mcmullen, from 2004 to 2008 she was a Clay Mathematics Institute research fellow and an assistant professor at Princeton University. In 2008, she became a professor of Mathematics at Stanford.
Insatiably curious, she saw all problems as capable of solution and compared her approach to “being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some luck you might find a way out”.
When she won the Fields Medal, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani amazed and delighted reformists by tweeting two photographs: one showing Maryam Mirzakhani with a headscarf (as required by Iranian law) and one without.
In 2005 she married Jan Vondrák, a Czech-born mathematician, who survives her with their daughter.
Maryam Mirzakhani, born May 3 1977, died July 15 2017