Celebratio Mathematica

On Ju­ly 14, 2017, Maryam Mirza­kh­ani, Stan­ford pro­fess­or of math­em­at­ics and the only fe­male win­ner of the pres­ti­gi­ous Fields Medal1 in Math­em­at­ics, died at the age of 40.

In just a few hours, her name, both in her nat­ive Farsi and Eng­lish, was trend­ing on Twit­ter and Face­book. Most ma­jor news agen­cies were cov­er­ing the news of her death as well as re­count­ing her many achieve­ments.

The grief was es­pe­cially hard-hit­ting for a gen­er­a­tion of young­er aca­dem­ics like me who have al­ways held Maryam as a role mod­el whose ex­ample is help­ing re­define wo­men’s status in sci­ence and es­pe­cially math­em­at­ics.

The irony was that Maryam al­ways tried to avoid the me­dia’s spot­light. Her mod­esty and sim­pli­city des­pite be­ing the only wo­man to gain such high status in the world of math­em­at­ics — win­ning what’s of­ten called the “No­bel Prize of math” — stood out to those who knew her.

Un­for­tu­nately, I did not get the chance to meet Maryam per­son­ally. But like many of my Ir­a­ni­an peers in aca­demia, I looked to her ex­ample as proof that the world would wel­come us and our sci­entif­ic con­tri­bu­tions no mat­ter our skin col­or, na­tion­al­ity or re­li­gion.

As people around the globe grieve the loss of this tal­en­ted math­em­atician, Maryam’s life stands as an in­spir­a­tion for young girls and boys from all walks of life the world over.

Des­pite her calm ex­pres­sion and warm smile, Maryam was a war­ri­or. She and her fam­ily, along­side many oth­er Ir­a­ni­ans, lived through the hard eco­nom­ic and so­cial trans­form­a­tions after the Ir­an re­volu­tion in 1979 and also sur­vived the eight years of the Ir­an–Ir­aq war a few years after that.

Maryam ori­gin­ally wanted to be a writer, a pas­sion of hers that nev­er faded away even dur­ing her post­gradu­ate stud­ies. However, she found an even great­er joy in how re­ward­ing it felt to solve math­em­at­ic­al prob­lems. As a stu­dent, she was the first fe­male mem­ber of Ir­an’s na­tion­al team to par­ti­cip­ate in the In­ter­na­tion­al Math Olympi­ad, and she won two gold medals in two con­sec­ut­ive years — still a re­cord.

She re­ceived her bach­el­or’s de­gree from Sharif Uni­versity of Tech­no­logy in Ir­an and later a doc­tor­ate from Har­vard. In 2014, Maryam was re­cog­nized with the Fields Medal, the highest-rank­ing award in math­em­at­ics, for her ef­forts in what’s known as hy­per­bol­ic geo­metry. Her work fo­cused on curved sur­faces — such as spheres or donut shapes — and how to un­der­stand their prop­er­ties. Her achieve­ments have ap­plic­a­tions in oth­er fields of sci­ence in­clud­ing quantum field the­ory, en­gin­eer­ing and ma­ter­i­al sci­ence, and could even in­flu­ence the­or­ies around how our uni­verse was born.

Maryam was a “hall of fame” all by her­self. She mod­estly at­trib­uted her own suc­cess to her per­sever­ance, hard work and pa­tience. As she put it:

The beauty of math­em­at­ics only shows it­self to more pa­tient fol­low­ers.

Un­for­tu­nately, when she was honored with the Fields Medal, she was already tack­ling her last chal­lenge, the breast can­cer that even­tu­ally killed her.

Maryam’s con­tri­bu­tions to the field of math­em­at­ics will long be re­membered. But just as im­port­ant is her leg­acy as a role mod­el.

Maryam was an Ir­a­ni­an, a wo­man and an im­mig­rant to the United States. Un­for­tu­nately, these three words to­geth­er raise red flags for some in West­ern coun­tries, par­tic­u­larly in the U.S., in the time of Trump’s pro­posed travel ban.

Against all odds, Maryam’s tal­ent was nur­tured in Ir­an and later flour­ished in the U.S. Her suc­cesses dis­cred­it the xeno­phobic ste­reo­types that are en­cour­aged by a polit­ics of fear. Maryam de­fied ex­pect­a­tions and rose above all the la­bels that make it easy to judge oth­ers who are not like “us.”

Maryam’s le­gend may con­tin­ue to grow after her early death. Still only 20 per­cent of full-time math fac­ulty at U.S. uni­versit­ies are wo­men, ac­cord­ing to a 2015 demo­graph­ic sur­vey of 213 de­part­ments by the Amer­ic­an Math­em­at­ic­al So­ci­ety. Re­search shows that ste­reo­typed role mod­els can in­flu­ence wheth­er people “see them­selves” in cer­tain STEM ca­reers. The ex­ample of a wo­man who rose to the top of this still very male field may help in­spire math’s next gen­er­a­tion.

In the same way people think of Mar­ie Curie or Jane Goodall as sci­entif­ic pi­on­eers, Maryam Mirza­kh­ani will go down in his­tory as a trail­blazer as well as a math­em­at­ic­al geni­us.

Mehr­dokht Pour­nader is a Seni­or Lec­turer on the fac­ulty of Busi­ness and Eco­nom­ics at The Uni­versity of Mel­bourne. She was born and raised in Ir­an.