Maryam Mirzakhani

Some Lesser Known Facts About Maryam Mirzakhani

• Does Maryam Mirzakhani smoke?: No

• Does Maryam Mirzakhani drink alcohol?: Not Known

• After watching TV biographies of famous personalities such as Marie Curie, Helen Keller, and reading the novel “Lust for Life“, about Vincent van Gogh, Maryam aspired to be a writer.

• She won a gold medal in the 1994 International Mathematical Olympiad and became the first female Iranian student to achieve it.

• In 2014, The International Mathematical Union decided to honor her after she discovered new advances in the theory of Riemann Surface, and in February 2017, she became the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, popularly known as the Nobel Prize of Math. 

• She discovered a formula to express the volume of moduli space as a polynomial in the number of boundary components.

• Her research includes Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry.

• At present, she teaches Mathematics at Stanford University, California. 

• On 15 July 2017, she passed away after a 4-year battle with breast cancer.