“you have to devote effort and energy to see the beauty of mathematics”

This was something that marked Maryam's life, making her a mathematical genius
as well as the first woman to win the Fields Medal, which is the equivalent of the
Nobel Prize in Mathematics.

Maryam mirzakhani, born in 1977 in Iran, grew up reading every book she could
find.
She wanted to become a writer and didn’t have much of an interés in math until
high school
Maryam managed to enter a questionnaire for an international math competition,
Excited by this new challenge, she demanded that her all-girl high school provide
the same math courses as the boys

As a teenager, Mirzakhani won gold medals at the 1994 and 1995 International
Mathematics Olympics for high school students, achieving a perfect score in
1995.
She graduated from Harvard University with a simple geodetic dissertation on
hyperbolic surfaces and volume of space.
Maryam created an equation that showed the relationship between the amount
of simple geodesics and the length of the side of a hyperbolic structure. Her work
is fundamental in understanding curved shapes and surfaces. You can believe it!

you surely know the pool tables and have played for hours
here was another unsolved problem in mathematics: a billiard ball is bouncing
around, hitting the
sides of a table forever in a frictionless environment. Will a ball that is hit from
any direction always end up where it started? What about the infinite possible
shapes of the billiard table? This problem was so complicated, computers
couldn’t even simulate it!
Maryam thought of a different way to solve this problem. Instead of moving the
ball around the table,She reflected the table around the ball. When the ball hits
one side, the table flips over and changes angle,so it would appear that the ball
remains in a straight line. She realized that the ball will always close.

She has been the first, and so far the only woman, to receive the considered Nobel
Prize in Mathematics, the Fields Medal. It was awarded to her at the age of 37,
during the International Congress of Mathematics (IMC) in Seoul, for having
explained symmetry on curved surfaces.
She was a Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University from September 2008
until her death.

Mirzajani was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013 and died on July 15, 2017

Her research, her teaching activity, her academic debates… have made her a
reference point for women around the world, who have chosen to dedicate their
lives and their intelligence to Science.