Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani (12 May 1977 - 14 July 2017) was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. She was the first woman and the first Iranian to be awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, in 2014 for her work on the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces. As a teenager in Iran she won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1994 and 1995, achieving a perfect score in 1995. She earned a BSc from Sharif University of Technology and a PhD from Harvard University, and died of breast cancer in 2017 at age 40.

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• Became the first woman, and the first Iranian, to win the Fields Medal in 2014 - a milestone that made her a national icon in Iran and a symbol for women in mathematics worldwide.Aug 12, 2014
• Diagnosed with breast cancer around 2013 and continued research and teaching while in treatment; she died on 14 July 2017 at age 40, and her death prompted tributes from heads of state and the worldwide mathematics community.Jul 14, 2017
• Won two IMO gold medals for the Islamic Republic of Iran: 1994 (score 41, rank 23) and 1995 (perfect score 42, rank 1) - a perfect-score Olympiad gold that foreshadowed her later dominance in mathematics.Jul 1995
• Earned her PhD at Harvard under Fields Medalist Curtis McMullen, working on the geometry and dynamics of Riemann surfaces - the theory that later won her the Fields Medal.2004
• Married Jan Vondrak (a Czech theoretical computer scientist) in 2008 and had one child; she and Vondrak met through mathematics and she was known to do her best work on large sheets of paper with her young daughter.2008