Maryam Mirzakhani

A girl was born on 12 May 1977 in Tehran, Iran. Her father Ahmad was an electrical engineer. Like every child she attended School. 

A bright child

She was so good in her studies that she also attended a program for talented children called "the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents (NODET)".

In 1994, she achieved the gold medal level in the International Mathematical Olympiad. It was the first time a girl was able to achieve this. In the next year, at International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score (highest) and to win two gold medals.

As a teenager, she won many competitions

She obtained her BSc in mathematics in 1999 from the Sharif University of Technology, then went to the United States for graduate work, earning her Ph.D. in 2004 from world-renowned Harvard University.

At Harvard, her professors and colleagues said she had a determination and questioned for more knowledge.

She was not a native English-speaker. So she used to take her class notes in Persian.

A young mathematician

Her continuous struggle and passion paid off; she was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014 for "her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".

This medal is equivalent to a Nobel prize in mathematics.

Maryam receiving her field medal

 

That girl is مریم میرزاخانی, Maryam Mirzakhani.

Personal Life and Quotes:

Mirzakhani described herself as a "slow" mathematician, saying that 

"you have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty of math." 

To solve problems, Mirzakhani would draw doodles on sheets of paper and write mathematical formulas around the drawings. Her daughter described her mother's work as "painting".

She doodled her thoughts on paper a lot

She declared:

"I don't have any particular recipe [for developing new proofs] ... It is like being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some luck, you might find a way out."

" The more time I spend on Math the more excited I get"

Mirzakhani was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. In 2016, cancer spread to her bones and liver, and she died on 14 July 2017 at the age of 40.

With her husband Jan Vondrák and Daughter- Anahita

On February 2, 2018, Satellogic, a high-resolution Earth observation imaging and analytics company, launched a ÑuSat type micro-satellite named in honor of Maryam Mirzakhani.

I am Saima Faisal, a passionate math teacher from Karachi. I want to tell parents, teachers, and students that math is not tough, it's not difficult to pass and it's not just for passing exams. It's a journey, a way of thinking, and all about discovery. It's exciting and rewarding. Below is the picture from my summer camp. I tell kids about Maryam, they get fascinated. Maybe one day we will also have a Maryam among us.