Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani was born in Tehran in 1977 and grew up during the war with Iraq. As a child she wanted to be a writer. A teacher in her first year of middle school told her she was not talented at mathematics, and she believed it for a while. A different teacher, and a brother who told her about a famous problem, changed her mind. At the Farzanegan girls' school she and a friend persuaded the head to run the same problem-solving classes the boys' school had.

In 1994 she won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad, and in 1995 another with a perfect score. In 1998, returning from a competition, the bus carrying her and other students went off a mountain road; several of her friends were killed. She rarely spoke of it.

She went to Harvard for her doctorate, arriving with limited English, and produced a thesis her supervisor described as the work of a mathematician of the first rank. Her subject was the geometry of curved surfaces, and the strange spaces that describe all the ways such a surface can be shaped. She worked slowly, drawing on enormous sheets of paper spread across the floor, and said she liked problems that took years.

In 2014 she became the first woman to win the Fields Medal. She had already been diagnosed with breast cancer. It spread, and she died in California in 2017, aged 40, leaving a husband and a young daughter.