Maryam, the mathematician
Mamata Pandya
I have written about women in different time periods, who have struggled, against all odds, to break glass ceilings in numerous fields. Their stories continue to inspire and move us even today. This is a contemporary story of a young woman who scaled new heights in mathematics, in a short life.
Maryam Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran, on 12 May 1977. Her father was an electrical engineer. She grew up with three siblings. Her parents were always supportive of their children and encouraged them to work towards something that would be meaningful and satisfying to them, rather than for what society would consider success and achievement. The 1980s were difficult years for growing up in Iran on account of the Iran-Iraq war. But Maryam was secure in the love of her family. She loved to read, wanted to become a writer and would make up stories. Science was not her first love; it was her older brother who gradually awakened the spark when he used to tell her what he had learnt at school.
The war ended around the time that Maryam finished elementary school. She joined the Farzanegan Middle School in Tehran where she met Roya Beheshti, who became her close friend. The two shared an interest in reading and used to spend a lot of time going to bookstores and buying books. Their school, administered by Iran’s National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents, aimed to educate the brightest pupils. The principal and teachers of the school were keen that their students should get the same opportunities as would students in a boys’ school.
Maryam did not do well in mathematics in her first year at Farzanegan. Her teacher told her that she was not particularly talented in that subject and Maryam lost interest and confidence in mathematics. However, in her second year she had a different mathematics teacher who encouraged her. This led Maryam and Roya to excitedly engage with mathematics.
When the two friends progressed to high school, they found a copy with six mathematical olympiad problems and Maryam managed to solve three of them. Encouraged by this, the girls asked their school principal if she could arrange for them to have mathematical problem-solving classes, as boys’ schools had for talented students. The principal was supportive and arranged classes for the girls. Later Maryam recalled that this positive mindset was a great influence in her life.
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Image courtesy: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117626026
Both Maryam and Roya made to the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad team in 1994 – the first girls to do so. The competition that year was held in Hong Kong and Maryam was awarded a gold medal, while Roya bagged the silver. The next year, Maryam, still in high school, became a member of the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad team, and was once again awarded a gold medal.
In 1995 Maryam joined the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran to study mathematics. She enjoyed the problem-solving sessions and informal reading groups, and also the support and friendship of many professors and students who inspired her, and shared her growing excitement with mathematics. She published several papers while pursuing her graduation. After obtaining her degree from the Sharif University in 1999, Mirzakhani left for the United States to join graduate school at Harvard University. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004 for her 130-page thesis Simple Geodesics on Hyperbolic Surfaces and Volume of the Moduli Space of Curves.
In 2004 she was offered a junior fellowship at Harvard, but turned down the offer. In the same year she was awarded a Clay Research Fellowship and was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. This was a great opportunity for her. As she recalled: The Clay Fellowship gave me the freedom to think about harder problems, travel freely, and talk to other mathematicians. I am a slow thinker, and have to spend a lot of time before I can clean up my ideas and make progress. So I really appreciate that I didn’t have to write up my work in a rush.
The fellowship gave her the time to produce some brilliant papers. After completion of her research fellowship in 2008, Maryam moved to Stanford University where she was appointed as Professor of Mathematics in 2009. She was then 31. Maryam married Jan Vondrak, a computer scientist whom she met while at Princeton. He also joined the faculty at Stanford in 2016. Their daughter Anahita was born in 2011. Maryam would spend hours at home with large sheets of paper sketching out ideas, diagrams, and formulae; her young daughter would remark, “Mummy is painting again!”
When once asked what was the most rewarding part of her work, Maryam had responded: Of course, the most rewarding part is the “Aha” moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new, the feeling of being on top of a hill, and having a clear view. But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight! I find discussing mathematics with colleagues of different backgrounds one of the most productive ways of making progress.
Maryam’s work soon led to her receiving recognition and awards. The most significant was the Fields Medal that Maryam was awarded in 2014.
The Fields Medal, established in 1936, is often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. But unlike the Nobel Prizes, the Fields Medals are given only to people aged 40 or younger, not just to honour their accomplishments but also to predict future mathematical triumphs.
Maryam was the first woman and the first Iranian to win this prize. It was presented to her at the International Congress of Mathematics, held in Seoul, South Korea on 13th August 2014. The award recognized Maryam’s “outstanding contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces, such as spheres, the surfaces of doughnuts and of hyperbolic objects”.
Even before she got this award, Maryam had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She continued her work, producing not only results of great significance but developing tools that would be used by other researchers in the field. The cancer spread to her liver and bones and she passed away in July 2017. Her death robbed mathematics of one of its brightest stars who, at the age of 40, was at the peak of her craft.
The little girl who loved to read and imagine, reached unimagined peaks in a subject that did not initially excite her. As she once said about the pursuit of mathematics: I don’t think that everyone should become a mathematician, but I do believe that many students don’t give mathematics a real chance. I did poorly in math for a couple of years in middle school; I was just not interested in thinking about it. I can see that without being excited, mathematics can look pointless and cold. The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.
The author worked at the Centre for Environment Education in Ahmedabad for over three decades, where she was engaged in instructional design for educators and children. She is now an independent consultant, editor, writer, translator, storyteller and blogger. She can be reached at mamata.pandya@gmail.com