Mirzakhani's Fields Medal · Maryam Mirzakhani

Culture of origin: Iranian · International

Holiday sources: Iran

At the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul, Maryam Mirzakhani received the Fields Medal for her work on 'the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces'. Born in Tehran in 1977, she studied at Sharif University of Technology, earned her doctorate at Harvard and became a full professor at Stanford. As a teenager she was the first Iranian woman to win gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad. She died of breast cancer in 2017, aged 40.