Meet the Woman Who Was First to Win Math’s Highest Honor
As part of Women’s History Month, The Channel Company and Women of the Channel are celebrating exceptional women who have made outstanding contributions in STEM. Each week this month will focus on one of the four areas of STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. This fourth week is dedicated to math.
We continue this series with a tribute to Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician who became the first woman and the first Iranian to be awarded a Fields Medal recognizing her outstanding contributions to dynamics and geometry.
The Fields Medal is only given every four years to deserving mathematicians under 40 years of age. It’s considered the Nobel Prize for math, intended to honor the most important mathematical discoveries, as well as up-and-coming talents.
Her receipt of such recognition demonstrates her contribution to the field of math. Mirzakhani’s work on Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces was game-changing and pushed her field in a new direction with a fresh point of view. Her work spanned several mathematical disciplines — hyperbolic geometry, complex analysis, topology, and dynamics — and influenced them all in return. Peers said her talent was rare, and her ability to tackle challenging math problems was renowned.
Math Wasn’t Her First Love
Mirzakhani was born on May 3, 1977, in Tehran and developed an early interest in solving problems. She loved reading and once thought she would pursue a literary career, but math captured her interest in middle school. She attended Tehran Farzanegan School, an all-girls school in Iran that taught gifted and talented students. She often competed in mathematics Olympiads, and, after graduating from high school, she competed internationally and won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad and the International Physics Olympiad in 1994.
Her academic success is legendary. She received undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. She then earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 2004 for her dissertation, “Simple Geodesics on Hyperbolic Surfaces and Volume of the Moduli Space of Curves.”
Mirzakhani held postdoctoral positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study before joining Stanford University’s faculty as a professor of mathematics in 2008.
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She Changed the Face of Mathematics
Mirzakhani’s dissertation was hailed as a masterpiece because it solved two longstanding math problems. Her thesis work generated several papers, which were published in top mathematics journals.
Mirzakhani became a research fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI), a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge. In 2013, she was awarded the CMI’s prestigious Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics for her work on the geometric and dynamic complexities of Riemann surfaces.
Her later work studied the dynamics of a billiard ball, examining point mass moving in a polygon. Her work opened new frontiers in research and showed that women can advance in a male-dominated field. Her legacy as a role model is sure to inspire other women to advance their discoveries.
Here’s what you need to know about Maryam Mirzakhani:
There has been a long underrepresentation of women in STEM careers and educational settings. Check out these great resources and more places to donate to help raise awareness to and support gender equity in STEM: