Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani grew up in Tehran, where she dreamed as a child of becoming a writer before discovering mathematics. She was the first female member of Iran's International Mathematical Olympiad team, winning gold medals in 1994 and a perfect score in 1995. She earned a bachelor's degree at Sharif University of Technology in 1999, then moved to the United States for a PhD at Harvard University, completed in 2004 under Curtis McMullen.

Mirzakhani's dissertation computed the volumes of moduli spaces of bordered Riemann surfaces and gave a new proof of Witten's conjecture on intersection numbers, work of unusual depth for a thesis. She went on to study the dynamics of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces under the action of the group $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$, and with Alex Eskin proved a measure-classification and equidistribution theorem — an analogue for moduli space of results of Ratner on homogeneous spaces — that resolved long-standing questions about billiards in polygons and translation surfaces. She joined Princeton University as a Clay Research Fellow and assistant professor, then Stanford University as a full professor in 2008.

In 2014 the International Mathematical Union awarded Mirzakhani the Fields Medal "for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces," the first time the medal went to a woman. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013, she continued research until the cancer spread; she died in Stanford, California, in 2017 at age 40. In her honour, 12 May — her birthday — is now marked as the International Day of Women in Mathematics.

Workplaces: Princeton University, Stanford University

Iran, United States

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