The following is an excerpt from A Mathematical Mosaic, by Dr. Ravi Vakil (https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/a-mathematical-mosaic/)
Maryam Mirzakhani was born on May 12, 1977 in Tehran, Iran. Her brother Arash, five years older, was interested in science and math, and would tell her the most interesting things that he learned. Although Maryam liked math, as a child she dreamt of becoming a novelist. In the highly selective Farzanegan Middle School, she met Roya Beheshti, who became a great friend. When in their second year at Farzanegan High School, Maryam and Roya obtained a copy of the problems from the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad, and after some time, they solved two of them.
In 1994 Maryam and Roya qualified for the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), held in Hong King. Maryam did astonishingly well, winning a gold medal, and missed a perfect paper by only a single point. Roya also shone, winning a silver medal. The next year, her final year of high school, Maryam won a second gold medal at the IMO (in Canada) with a perfect paper.
In 1999, she received her B. Sc. from the prestigious Sherif University and published her first book, Elementary Number Theory: Challenging Problems, co-authored with Roya. Accepting an offer to pursue a Ph.D. program at Harvard, Maryam proceeded to explore the volume of a mathematical object, that appeared in a number of fields, including hyperbolic geometry, algebraic geometry, and string theory, with connections to all sorts of important work, including a conjecture of Edward Witten (Fields Medal 1990). In her research, Maryam discovered how to compute the mysterious volume by cutting the surface into small pieces (“pairs of pants’’) every which way, and reassembling the data using some creative innovations. These ideas, presented in her doctoral thesis, broke open new connections between fields, and opened up new problems and new ways of tackling old problems. Maryam published her ideas in the top three journals in mathematics.
In 2004, Maryam declined a junior fellowship at Harvard, to become an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. When her Clay Research Fellowship at Princeton expired in 2008 she accepted an appointment as Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University. In 2014, she was awarded a Fields Medal … for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces, and became the first woman to win this prestigious award. Tragically, she succumbed to breast cancer on July 14, 2017 at age 40, leaving behind her husband Jan and daughter Anahita.
Her advice for others: Follow what you like, and try your best. Even if you don’t get precisely to where you were aiming for, you’ll get somewhere that will make you happy.
