Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017) was an Iranian mathematician and professor of mathematics. She was the first woman, and the first Iranian to be honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics.

 

When she was in high school, Maryam found a copy of six Mathematical Olympiad problems and managed to complete three of them. Encouraged, she asked if she could take mathematical problem-solving classes which, at the time, were only available to boys. The classes were arranged and Maryam made the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad team in 1994 and 1995, winning a gold medal both times. She was the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score and win two medals.

 

Maryam went on to study further and she moved to the United States to earn her Ph.D. at Harvard University. She would take her class notes in Persian, not being a native English-speaker. Her thesis at Harvard solved a problem of calculating the volume of hyperbolic surfaces that had puzzled mathematicians for years. “The more I spent time on mathematics, the more excited I became.”

 

In 2014, Maryam was honoured with the Fields Medal, the world’s top mathematics award, for her many contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces (the surface of a plane or sphere) and their moduli spaces. She was the first woman, and first Iranian, to win this award.