Maryam Mirzakhani (Persian: مریم میرزاخانی, pronounced [mæɾˈjæm miːɾzɑːxɑːˈniː]; 12 May 1977 – 14 July 2017) was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Her research focused on hyperbolic geometry, dynamical systems, complex analysis, and topology. In 2014, she was awarded the Fields Medal for her work in "the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces", becoming the first woman and the first Iranian citizen to win the prize. Along with the Fields Medal, her work earned numerous honors, including the Blumenthal Award, the Satter Prize, and the Clay Research Award. Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Mirzakhani studied mathematics at Sharif University of Technology, graduating in 1999 before earning her doctorate from Harvard University in 2004 under the supervision of Curtis T. McMullen. She subsequently held positions at Princeton University and Stanford University, becoming a full professor at Stanford in 2009. Through her research in the 2000s and 2010s, Mirzakhani made major contributions to the understanding of hyperbolic surfaces, Teichmüller dynamics, and the geometry of moduli spaces. In colloboration with Alex Eskin and later Amir Mohammadi, she achieved breakthrough results on the dynamics of moduli spaces that became known as the "magic wand theorem". Mirzakhani died from breast cancer on 14 July 2017 at the age of 40. Following her death, several initiatives and awards were established in her memory, including the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize and the 12 May Initiative, both of which aim to promote the participation of women in mathematics.
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 years of high school, she won the gold medal for mathematics in the Iranian National Olympiad, thus allowing her to bypass the national college entrance exam. In 1994, Mirzakhani became the first Iranian woman 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 the full score and to win two gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad. Mirzakhani’s earliest published works, when she was a high school student and in early college, were in graph theory. Her first publication, in 1995, was on decomposing complete tripartite graphs into 5-cycles. Later in her life, she collaborated with friend, colleague, and IMO silver medalist Roya Beheshti Zavareh (Persian: رؤیا بهشتی زواره) on their book Elementary Number Theory, Challenging Problems (in Persian), which was published in 1999. 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 fell off a cliff, killing seven of the passengers, all Sharif University students, in what is remembered as a national tragedy in Iran. Mirzakhani and Zavareh were two of the survivors. In 1999, she obtained a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the Sharif University of Technology. During her time there, she developed a simpler proof of 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 T. McMullen. At Harvard, she is said to have been "distinguished by determination and relentless questioning". She used to take her class notes in her native language Persian.
Career 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.
Research work
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