Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani was born on May 3, 1977, in Tehran. Her father, Ahmad Mirzakhani, was an electrical engineer. She attended Farzanegan High School in Tehran, part of Iran's National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents, and excelled at the International Mathematical Olympiad during those years: she won a gold medal in 1994 and, in 1995, won gold again with a perfect score, becoming one of the first girls on Iran's national Olympiad team.

She completed her undergraduate degree in mathematics at Sharif University of Technology, where professors including Ebadollah Mahmoodian and Siavash Shahshahani nurtured her talent. She then went to Harvard University, earning her PhD in mathematics in 2004 under Curtis McMullen; her dissertation, which resolved a conjecture of Edward Witten concerning the volume of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces, drew immediate attention. After graduating, she became a mathematics professor at Princeton University and, from 2008, joined Stanford University, where she taught and conducted research for the rest of her life.

Mirzakhani's central work concerned the geometry and dynamics of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces. By combining tools from hyperbolic geometry, Teichmüller theory, topology, and dynamical systems, she uncovered deep connections among these fields, including results on counting closed geodesics on hyperbolic surfaces and computing the volumes of moduli spaces. In 2014, the Fields Medal committee recognized this body of work with the award; she was the first woman and the first Iranian to receive it.

Mirzakhani was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013 and died in Stanford on July 14, 2017, at the age of 40. Her death drew widespread attention in Iran and the scientific world, and her birthday (May 12) is observed in some circles as International Women in Mathematics Day.