A brilliant mind: Remembering Iranian maths genius Maryam Mirzakhani

Five years have passed since the death of Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematics genius whose long list of international accolades and substantial role in elevating academia have made her a scientific celebrity, ensuring her popularity transcends the borders of Iran.

On July 14, 2017, at the age of 40, the young Mirzakhani died of breast cancer after four years of grappling with illness. She is the first and only woman so far to have received a Fields Medal from the International Mathematical Union since the award’s inception in 1936. Unofficially known as the Nobel Prize in mathematics, Fields goes to scholars and researchers aged 40 or younger who make outstanding contributions to mathematics.

The reason cited for the selection of Mirzakhani was her remarkable contributions to “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.” In 2006, when she was only 28, the Popular Science recognised her as one of the "Brilliant 10” for pushing the boundaries in her disciplines and spurring innovative change.

"Not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel for progress in a resources-strapped society where top-notched scientists are often marginalised and vulnerable to oblivion, she made a decision to leave Iran"

In 1994, while studying as a high school student, Mirzakhani became the first Iranian woman to win a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong. The following year, she consummated her Olympiad performance by winning a second gold at the 1995 edition of the events in Canada, this time scoring 42 out of 42 in the test.

She was educated at the elite Sharif University of Technology, a highly competitive college whose graduates often end up leaving the country, and is known as the launching pad of gifted Iranian students to immigrate and land vaunted postgraduate careers or senior jobs across Europe and North America.

Her story wasn’t fundamentally different from her other Sharif schoolmates. Not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel for progress in a resources-strapped society where top-notched scientists are often marginalised and vulnerable to oblivion, she made a decision to leave Iran, and moved to the United States in 1999 to pursue her academic journey. One year earlier, at the age of 20, she had survived a fatal bus crash that killed six of her Sharif University friends.

pic.twitter.com/cXTCSB9AEt

— The Fields Institute (@FieldsInstitute) August 12, 2022

Maryam completed a Ph.D. in 2003 at Harvard University under the supervision of the Fields medalist Curtis T. McMullen and joined the Denver-based Clay Mathematics Institute as a research fellow the same year. Through 2004-2008, she was hired as an assistant professor at Princeton University, whose mathematics department is ranked by the US News & World Report as the first school in the United States, tied with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On her death, Princeton’s president Christopher L. Eisgruber said, “Maryam Mirzakhani’s death was a terrible tragedy. I was shocked and saddened to read of it; what a luminous mind, lost far too young.”

In 2009, she fulfilled what could have been one of her biggest ambitions: joining Stanford University as a full professor. Stanford remains one of the utopian destinations of many aspiring students worldwide, thriving on its distinguished faculty, world-class facilities and cutting-edge research.

In the later years of her life, she collaborated with a University of Chicago professor to solve a mathematical riddle that had remained stubbornly unanswered for decades, namely the trajectory of a billiard ball around a polygonal table, and it was mostly a preoccupation for physicists to simplify it. The outcome of her work was a 200-page paper which at the time of its publication in 2013, was lauded as a “titanic work” marking “the beginning of a new era” in mathematics.

Upon her death, Iran's then President Hassan Rouhani published a message of condolences on his Instagram page with a photo of Maryam Mirzakhani without the headscarf, a negation of the Islamic Republic's strict compulsory hijab codes.

That was an unprecedented gesture for a senior Iranian politician who was also a cleric, which many Iranians welcomed as the president’s tribute to Mirzakhani's legacy without the usual fixations of the government on women's traditional gender roles and their appearance.

"A scientist with an unassuming and austere lifestyle is now a heroine in the eyes of millions of Iranians because her journey is a living example of how a sustained fight against inequalities and a committed quest for excellence can pay off and deliver change"

Iranians are now commemorating Maryam Mirzakhani on social media amid a curious silence by the authorities of the administration of the hardline President Ebrahim Raisi who apparently don’t feel obliged to eulogise her, at least rhetorically, which goes some way to explain the rampancy of misogynistic attitudes in the government Raisi helms.

But even without endorsement by the establishment, Maryam Mirzakhani is a towering female pioneer with a global impact, and luminaries of science like her are adulated by humanity, whether or not those in power recognise the value of knowledge and education and as they continue being at the mercy of their short-sighted agendas.

She is now viewed by many young Iranian girls as a role model. She fought the disparities, came of age and made headway in a patriarchal society, and overrode the geographical boundaries to translate her desires into reality.

She capitalised on the ample academic opportunities at her disposal in the United States to get to the point when she could leave a lasting legacy. Indeed, it was by virtue of living in a country that cherished hard work and incubated advanced study of sciences, including maths, that Mirzakhani earned international plaudits and achieved news milestones.

She was consistently described by her colleagues and mentors as humble, diligent and hardworking, and although she scarcely vied for media visibility, she was frequently approached by prominent journalists who wanted to unlock the mysteries of her groundbreaking success and report on her magical life.

For young Iranians, it is mostly artists, celebrities and social media stars who come to be admired as motivators. But a scientist with an unassuming and austere lifestyle is now a heroine in the eyes of millions of Iranians because her journey is a living example of how a sustained fight against inequalities and a committed quest for excellence can pay off and deliver change.

In a society where women are routinely belittled, stripped of opportunities and indoctrinated to play second fiddle to the invincible dominance of their male counterparts, Maryam Mirzakhani is a peerless inspiration and a testimonial to the conviction that determination, ambition and hard work beat any barrier, however insurmountable they may be.

Kourosh Ziabari is an award-winning Iranian journalist and reporter. He is the Iran correspondent of Fair Observer and Asia Times. He is the recipient of a Chevening Award from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office and an American Middle Eastern Network for Dialogue at Stanford Fellowship.

Follow him on Twitter @KZiabari

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