Maryam Mirzakhani, Fields Medal winner, passes away

Maryam Mirzakhani, the first and only woman to receive the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics, died on 15 July 2017 after battling with breast cancer. She was 40.

The Tehran-born Mirzakhani is the first and to-date only female winner of the Fields Medal since its inception in 1936.

The mathematician had received the medal for her work in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces.

About Maryam Mirzakhani

• Born on 3 May 1977, Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.

• Growing up in Iran, she attended an all-girls high school and gained recognition as a teenager in the 1994 and 1995 competitions of the International Mathematical Olympiad.

• She later graduated from Sharif University in Tehran and then headed to Harvard University in Massachusetts, to obtain her doctorate in mathematics.

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

• On 13 August 2014, she became both the first woman and the first Iranian to be honoured with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics. The award committee cited her work in "the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".