Wonderful profile of the late Maryam Mirzakhani from Scientific American.
Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman and first Iranian to win the Fields Medal, often described as the rough equivalent of a Nobel prize for mathematicians, died of metastatic breast cancer on July 15, at the age of 40. She had been a professor at Stanford University since 2008.
The loss feels personal to many women in mathematics. “My mailbox is full of messages from other women,” says Ingrid Daubechies, a math professor at Duke University. “Women mathematicians all over the world are e-mailing each other, trying to comfort each other. It is heartbreaking that we had to lose a gifted mathematician and wonderful role model so soon.”
Born in Tehran, Mirzakhani studied mathematics at Sharif University of Technology there before coming to the U.S. to get a PhD at Harvard University in 2004. As she told Quanta Magazine in 2014, she did not grow up wanting to become a mathematician. As a child, she loved to read and make up stories and thought she might be a writer. But despite some discouraging classes in middle school, she eventually discovered a passion for mathematics and proved brilliant at it.
Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!