Maths 'genius' Maryam Mirzakhani dies, aged 40
Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born mathematician who was the first woman to win the coveted Fields Medal, died Saturday in a US hospital after a battle with cancer. She was 40.
Mirzakhani's friend Firouz Naderi, a former director of Solar Systems Exploration at Nasa, announced her death on Instagram.
"A light was turned off today. It breaks my heart ..... gone far too soon," he wrote, later adding: "A genius? Yes. But also a daughter, a mother and a wife."
Mirzakhani, a professor at Stanford University in California, died after the cancer she had been battling for four years spread to her bone marrow, Iranian media said.
In 2014 Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Mathematics, which is awarded by the International Congress of Mathematicians.
The award recognized her sophisticated and original contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces such as spheres.
Born in 1977 and raised in Tehran, Mirzakhani initially dreamed of becoming a writer, but by the time she started high school and showed an affinity for solving math problems she shifted her sights.
In 2008 she became a professor of mathematics at Stanford. She is survived by her husband, Stanford mathematician Jan Vondrak, and her young daughter Anahita.
Mirzakhani became known on the international mathematics scene as a teenager, winning gold medals at both the 1994 and 1995 International Math Olympiads -- and finished with a perfect score in the latter competition.
She went on to win the 2009 Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics, and the 2013 Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society.
Mirzakhani studied mathematics at Sharif University in Iran and earned a PhD degree from Harvard in 2004. She then taught at Princeton University before moving to Stanford in 2008.
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