Maryam Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran. She aspired to become a writer while attending the girls-only Tehran Farzanegan School, but her fascination with mathematics eventually led her to become a mathematician. In her junior and senior years of high school, she was awarded the gold medal for mathematics in the Iranian National Olympiad. At 17, she scored 41 out of 42 points at the International Mathematical Olympiad and became the first Iranian woman to win first place. The following year, Mirzakhani and Roya Beheshti Zavareh became the first women to participate in the Iranian National Mathematical Olympiad, where she won the gold medal (and Zavareh the silver medal). That same year, she won two gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad and made history as the first Iranian to achieve a perfect score. After high school, she studied mathematics at the Sharif University of Technology and then moved to the US to continue her studies. In 2004, after receiving her Ph.D. from Harvard University, she served as a research fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute and a professor at Princeton University. In 2009, she became a professor at Stanford University. Mirzakhani specialized in theoretical mathematics, focusing her research on moduli spaces, hyperbolic geometry, Teichmüller theory, symplectic geometry, and Ergodic theory, and identifying the geometric dynamic and complexities of curved surfaces like spheres, amoebas, and doughnut shapes. Her original work has contributed to other science fields, including theoretical physics, engineering, and material science. In 2014, she proved that the moduli space (a geometric space whose points represent algebro-geometric objects) is regular and not irregular or fractal. Later that year, she was awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, for her “outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.” She was the first woman and Iranian to receive the award. In 2017, at 40, she died after a long battle with breast cancer. Read more...