Brilliant Iranian mathematician, Maryam Mirzakhani (1977 – 2017), is the first – and to date only – woman to be awarded the prestigious Fields Medal for work in mathematics.
A gifted child
Maryam Mirzakhani was born on May 12, 1977 in Tehran, Iran. An intelligent child, a brilliant student, she was admitted to Farzanegan high school in Tehran, a school for girls; the establishment depends on the National Organization for the Development of Exceptional Talents (ONDTE or SAMPAD), dedicated to the education of gifted students. She received a high-level education there, which stimulated her intellectual abilities.
At first, Maryam shows a more marked inclination for letters, literature and writing; she dreams of becoming a writer. As a teenager, however, a book on Carl Friedrich Gauss introduced to her by her brother aroused in her a great interest in numbers. The book discusses the method for easily summing all the integers from 1 to 100, by summing two by two starting from the ends (1 + 100, 2 + 99, etc.). Passionate, Maryam decides to devote herself to mathematics."It's fun “, she will explain later. “It’s like solving a puzzle, or connecting the dots in a police investigation. »
The young girl very quickly demonstrated her talent and intelligence:in 1994, at the age of seventeen, she was the first woman to be part of the Iranian team for the International Mathematical Olympiads. She won a gold medal there, with a score of 41 points out of 42. A small point missing which she would win the following year, by achieving a perfect score at the 1995 Olympics in Toronto; a performance that earned him another gold medal. She is the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score, and to obtain two gold medals during this competition.
A masterpiece
Maryam Mirzakhani begins studies at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, a very selective establishment, and continues mathematical competitions. In 1998, returning from one of these competitions, she was close to death and survived a tragic bus accident, during which seven of her comrades and two drivers lost their lives. After graduating in 1999, Maryam studied at Harvard where she completed her thesis, a work described as a "masterpiece" in which she solves and connects two major mathematical problems. The professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago will say of this thesis:“The majority of mathematicians will never produce something as good. And that's what she did in her thesis (Most mathematicians won't produce anything as good. And that's what she did in her thesis).
Following her thesis, Maryam became a lecturer at Princeton and then a professor at Stanford. She specializes in topology and geometry, and her work focuses on Riemann surfaces. In 2014, she was awarded the Fields Medal “for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces” . Since 1936, this distinction has been awarded every four years to four mathematicians under the age of forty. Maryam is then the first (and to date the only) woman and the first Iranian to receive the “Nobel Prize for Mathematics”. On receiving the Fields Medal, the International Mathematical Union wrote of Maryam:"Familiar with a remarkable diversity of mathematical techniques and mathematical cultures, she embodies a rare balance between superb technical performance, bold ambition, far-reaching vision and deep curiosity. »
The story of Maryam Mirzakhani comes to a tragic end; in July 2017, she passed away from breast cancer which she had been fighting since 2013, leaving behind a husband and a daughter. The press and the world of mathematics unanimously hail Maryam as a great scientist and a pioneer.