New Yorker:

The Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who died on Friday, at the age of forty, was known to her colleagues as a virtuoso in the dynamics and geometry of complex surfaces—“science-fiction mathematics,” one admirer called it—and to her young daughter, Anahita, as something of an artist. At the family’s home, near Stanford University, Mirzakhani would spend hours on the floor with supersized canvases of paper, sketching out ideas, drawing diagrams and formulae, often leading Anahita, now six, to exclaim, “Oh, Mommy is painting again!”

Mirzakhani could be private and retiring, but she was also indomitable and energetic, especially at the blackboard. According to Roya Beheshti, an algebraic geometer at Washington University in St. Louis, and a lifelong friend—the two talked math, read math, and did math, sometimes competitively, for several years growing up—Mirzakhani’s passion was evident early on. “Maryam’s work was driven by a certain pure joy,” Beheshti told me. “A lot of people have been saying how humble she was, and that’s true. She was very humble. She was also really, really ambitious. From the very beginning, from a very young age, it was clear that she had very big goals.” When Mirzakhani was in sixth grade, in Tehran, a teacher discouraged her interest in mathematics, noting that she was not particularly talented, not at the top of the class. A quarter century later, in 2014, she became the first woman (and the first Iranian) to win the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor.

Mirzakhani took pride in the accolades, but they were not her main concern. When her doctoral adviser, Harvard’s Curtis McMullen, delivered the Fields Medal laudation on her work, at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians, in Seoul, Mirzakhani sat in the front row with her daughter and her husband, the Stanford computer scientist Jan Vondrák. Looking out into the audience, McMullen noticed that Mirzakhani wasn’t paying full attention to her moment of glory, instead allowing herself to be distracted by a very excited Anahita. “Some scientists and mathematicians engage in a problem to go beyond what other people have done; they measure themselves against others,” McMullen told me. “Maryam was not like that. She would engage directly with the scientific challenge, with the mathematics, no matter how hard it was, and really go deep into the heart of the matter.”

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