Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017) was an optimist and an innovator, contributing new points of view and new teachings to the fields of dynamics and geometry. She is the only woman to have won the coveted Fields Medal.
Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017) was an optimist and an innovator, contributing new points of view and new teachings to the fields of dynamics and geometry. She is the only woman to have won the coveted Fields Medal.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Luvvie Ajayi Jones. I’m a New York Times Best Selling author and host of the podcast Professional Troublemaker. I’m so excited to be your guest host for this month of Womanica!
This month, we’re talking about Prodigies: women who achieved great things at early ages.
Today’s prodigy was one of the most brilliant minds in mathematics. She was an optimist and an innovator, contributing new points of view and new teachings to the fields of dynamics and geometry. She never shied away from difficult problems, preferring to instead tangle herself up in them to better understand the root of the situation. And to this day, she is the only woman to have won the coveted Fields Medal in its 86-year-history.
Please welcome Maryam Mirzakhani.
Maryam was born in May 1977 in Tehran, Iran. The Iran-Iraq war came to a close as Maryam was entering middle school. She’d later say she saw herself as part of a “lucky” generation who experienced relative peace in the war’s aftermath.
Maryam attended Farzanegan Middle School for girls, a program dedicated to educating accelerated or bright students. Ironically, Maryam didn’t excel in mathematics during her first year. In fact, a teacher told her she was “not particularly talented” in the subject. Instead,Maryam was deeply interested in literature and writing at the time. She even wanted to be an author when she grew up.
But, by the time she reached high school, Maryam demonstrated a newfound interest in math. She and her friend solved three Mathematical Olympiad problems on their own, much to the surprise of the school’s principal. The Olympiad is a prestigious annual international math competition for youth. Although women had never competed on the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad Team, or even participated in mathematical problem-solving classes at the school, Maryam convinced her principal to arrange such a class. And in 1994, Maryam qualified for the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad team.
At the age of 17, she won a gold medal at the Olympiad. Her score was a 41 out of 42. The next year, she won again– this time, with a perfect score.
Maryam continued studying math at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, where she published multiple papers as an undergraduate. She graduated in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree and traveled to the US to earn her PhD from Harvard.
As a doctoral candidate, Maryam worked with renowned mathematician Curtis McMullen. She focused on what are called Riemann surfaces: abstract surfaces with several holes in them that are defined by complex functions. Maryam reversed the method usually used to study these surfaces, offering a new solution to others investigating them. Her work shed new light on theorems in other fields, including quantum field theory.
After receiving her doctorate, Maryam turned down a junior fellowship at Harvard to become a Clay Mathematics Institute research fellow at Princeton University. In 2008, she became a professor at Stanford University. At 31 years old, she was considered a leader in the fields of hyperbolic geometry, topology and dynamics. That same year, she married fellow mathematician and professor, Jan Vondrák. They had a daughter together, named Anahita, in 2011.
Her work at this point focused on the interaction between dynamics and geometry, like a complicated– and eternal– game of billiards.
Though the mathematics Maryam focused on were often unending and extremely difficult, she was recognized as a career-long optimist. She described herself as a “slow” mathematician, precisely because she usually chose the more laborious way to solve a problem. While her method took more time, she said she felt it brought her closer to the heart of the math she was engaging with. While her peers stopped short before pursuing a proof that could fail, Maryam followed rabbit holes to their source.
When solving math problems, Maryam would often doodle her proofs across giant pieces of paper laid on the floor. Her daughter called it “painting.”
In 2014, Maryam received the Fields Medal. The award, established in 1936, is one of the most important prizes in mathematics. It’s only awarded to people aged 40 or younger, every four years. When Maryam won, she became the first Iranian, and the first woman, to win the award. To this day, she’s the only woman to have won it.
Maryam died on July 14, 2017, of breast cancer. She was 40 years old.
All month, we’re highlighting prodigies. For more information find us on Facebook and Instagram @womanicapodcast.
Special thanks to creators Jenny and Liz Kaplan for inviting me to guest host.
Talk to you tomorrow!