Maryam mirzakhani, an mathematician who was the first woman to win the Fields models.has died in a US hospital after a battle with cancer. She was 40.
Mirzakhani' friend Firouz Naderi announced her death on Saturday on Instagram.
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 highly 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 her affinity for solving mathematical problems and working on proofs had shifted her sights.
"It is fun - it's like solving a puzzle or connecting the dots in a detective case," she said when she won the Fields Medal.
"I felt that this was something I could do, and I wanted to pursue this path."
Mirzakhani said she enjoyed pure mathematics because of the elegance and longevity of the questions she studies.
In 2008 she became a professor of mathematics at Stanford. She is survived by her husband and young daughter.
No comments:
Post a Comment