Maryam Mirzakhani's Birthday is Declared World Day of Women in Mathematics
Independent Aggregator of Iran-related News/Events, Kodoom.com: The birthday on May 3 of Maryam Mirzakhani, who passed away from cancer in July 2017, has been recognized by International Mathematical Union as International Women in Mathematics day.
In July 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani made history as the first woman to win a Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics
The Fields Medal was not the first of Mirzakhani's accolades. She was a Clay Mathematics Research Fellow, she won the Clay Research Award and the AMS Blumenthal award, and was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was a Professor in the Mathematics Department at Stanford University, where she inspired students and colleagues alike.
Maryam Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1977. In a film made by the Simons Foundation and the International Mathematical Union, she describes herself as the “lucky generation” because, by the time she was a teenager, the Iran-Iraq war was over and opportunities were open to young people. She tells us that, as a girl, she was more excited about reading novels than doing mathematics, and thought she would be a writer. She was first drawn to mathematics because of its challenge, but then found that it was “really nice”, and that she enjoyed doing it. She was the first student in her all-girls high-school in Tehran to participate in the International Math Olympiad (IMO), where she became the first Iranian to win two gold medals, achieving a perfect score in 1995. By the time she was an undergraduate at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Maryam must have begun to identify as a mathematician: she published three papers as an undergraduate, one of which is cited regularly by combinatorists. She went on to receive a PhD from Harvard University, working under the supervision of Curtis McMullen. Her 2004 thesis quickly brought her recognition as a creative, even visionary mathematician. In this work, Mirzakhani solved two longstanding open problems, connecting the two together in a thesis that experts in the field describe as “truly spectacular”.
Maryam Mirzakhani wrote the following in 2013 in response to being awarded the Satter prize:
“… in my opinion, the situation of women in math is far from ideal. The social barriers for girls who are interested in mathematical sciences might not be lower now than they were when I grew up. And balancing career and family remains a big challenge. It makes most women face difficult decisions which usually compromise their work. However, there has been a lot of progress over the years, and I am sure this trend will continue.”
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