Born on May 12, 1977, in Tehran, Mirzakhani was raised in a family with an interest in mathematics; her father was an electrical engineer. After elementary school, she was accepted in a talented high school in Tehran, where she managed to receive the gold medal in Iran’s Mathematics Olympiad, being qualified to attend Hong Kong and Canada math Olympiads.
A young mathematician, Mirzakhani received her first international honor in Canada with a gold medal and the highest score among students around the globe.
She then entered Sharif Industrial University, a high-ranking university in Iran, where she could find a simpler proof for Schur's theorem which was published in Mathematical Society of America monthly journal.
After graduation, Mirzakhani went to Harvard University and attended the Fields Medal winner Curtis McMullen who recalls her asking a lot of questions in his classes and hastily taking notes.
She graduated as a math PhD holder from Harvard and immediately was accepted as an assistant professor at Princeton University, where she solved the problem of counting simple closed geodesics on hyperbolic Riemann surfaces by finding a relationship to volume calculations on moduli space. She then went to Stanford University.
At Stanford, she married her colleague Jan Vondrák who was a Czech theoretical computer scientist and applied mathematician.
Awards
Mirzakhani received the Fields Medal, the highest decoration in math, for her “outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”. This becomes more valuable when we know that she was the first woman ever to receive this medal.
In 2005, she was elected among 10 young minds and the top mind in math in the Popular Science journal in the United States.
She also received Blumenthal Award in 2009 and Sattre Prize in 2013 from the American Mathematical Society.
UN Women included Mirzakhani in its list of seven influential female scientists in 2019. Her birthday on May 12 has been named International Women in Mathematics Day by International Council for Science.
The legendary mathematician woman finally passed away on July 14, 2017, at the age of 40 after battling cancer.
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