Maryam Mirzakhani

1977 – 2017

Maryam Mirzakhanis
Maryam Mirzakhani ronounced was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.

Early life and education

Mirzakhani was born on 12 May 1977 in Tehran, Iran. As a child, she attended Tehran Farzanegan School, part of the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents (NODET). In her junior and senior year of high school, she won the gold medal for mathematics in the Iranian National Olympiad, thus allowing her to bypass the national college entrance exams. In 1994, Mirzakhani became the first Iranian female to win a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong, scoring 41 out of 42 points.The following year, in Toronto, she became the first Iranian to achieve a perfect score and to win two gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad. Later in her life, she collaborated with friend, colleague, and Olympiad silver medalist, Roya Beheshti Zavareh, on their book Elementary Number Theory, Challenging Problems which was published in 1999. Mirzakhani and Zavareh together were the first women to compete in the Iranian National Mathematical Olympiad and won gold and silver medals respectively in 1995. On 17 March 1998, after attending a conference consisting of gifted individuals and former Olympiad competitors, Mirzakhani and Zavareh, along with other attendees boarded a bus in Ahvaz en route to Tehran. The bus was involved in an accident wherein it fell off a cliff, killing seven of the passengers—all Sharif University students. This incident is widely considered to be a national tragedy in Iran. Mirzakhani and Zavareh were two of the few survivors. In 1999, she obtained a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the Sharif University of Technology. During her time there, she received recognition from the American Mathematical Society for her work in developing a simple proof for a theorem of Schur. She then went to the United States for graduate work, earning a PhD in 2004 from Harvard University, where she worked under the supervision of the Fields Medalist Curtis .Mirzakhani was a 2004 research fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute and a professor at Princeton University. In 2009, she became a professor at Stanford University.

Awards and honors

  • Gold medal. International Mathematical Olympiad (Hong Kong 1994).
  • Gold medal. International Mathematical Olympiad (Canada 1995).
  • IPM Fellowship, Tehran, Iran, 1995–1999.
  • Merit fellowship Harvard University, 2003.
  • Harvard Junior Fellowship Harvard University, 2003.
  • Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellow 2004.
  • AMS Blumenthal Award 2009.
  • Invited to talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, on the topic of "Topology and Dynamical Systems & ODE".
  • The 2013 AMS Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics. "Presented every two years by the American Mathematical Society, the Satter Prize recognizes an outstanding contribution to mathematics research by a woman in the preceding six years. The prize was awarded on 10 January 2013, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego.
  • Simons Investigator Award 2013.
  • Named one of Nature magazine's ten "people who mattered" of 2014.
  • Clay Research Award 2014.
  • Fields Medal 2014.
  • Elected foreign associate to the French Academy of Sciences in 2015.
  • Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2015.
  • National Academy of Sciences 2016.
  • Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
  • Asteroid 321357 Mirzakhani was named in her memory.The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center (MPC 108698).

Mirzakhani was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. In 2016, the cancer spread to her bones and liver, and she died on 14 July 2017 at the age of 40 at Stanford Hospital in Stanford, California.


If you have time, you should read more about this incredible human being on her Wikipedia entry.