Stanford Celebrates Women's History Makers: Maryam Mirzakhani

A pioneering female spirit has been a part of Stanford’s legacy since its inception, when co-founder Jane Stanford, together with her husband, decreed that the institution would be a “university for both sexes,” offering an education for men and women “equally full and complete, varied only as nature dictates.” Join us in celebrating the Stanford women who have fought since then for hard-won accomplishments in medicine, math, athletics, business, law, economics, administration, public service and even – especially – space.

Maryam Mirzakhani

Mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani explored geometry that’s hard for most people to wrap their minds around – and found it beautiful.

As a girl in Iran, she imagined being a writer. But after her older brother introduced her to an elegant math trick, she became entranced by numbers.

Mirzakhani did poorly in math in her first year of middle school. But a change in teachers, from one who didn’t see her talent to one who did, made all the difference. A year later, she was a star. 

“It’s so important what others see in you,” Mirzakhani told Quanta Magazine in 2014.

At 17, she was one of the first two girls to make the Iranian International Mathematical Olympiad team. Mirzakhani earned a gold medal her first year in the competition and a perfect score the next.

Mirzakhani studied math in Tehran before earning a PhD at Harvard. She joined the Stanford faculty in 2008, continuing to study abstract concepts such as hyperbolic surfaces – surfaces in curved space that are often described as the shape of Pringles chips or multi-holed donuts, though they’re far more complex, existing outside familiar Euclidean geometry.

In 2014, Mirzakhani was the first woman and first Iranian to win the Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics.

Mirzakhani was known for filling sheets of paper with drawings she used to help her focus while navigating difficult problems. When she died of breast cancer at age 40 in 2017, her obituary in the New Yorker recounted these drawings, calling her “a virtuoso in the dynamics and geometry of complex surfaces.”

But Mirzakhani attributed her success to a slow-and-steady persistence – not to “quicksilver brilliance.”

“The beauty of mathematics,” she said, “only shows itself to more patient followers.”

Read the full article "Stanford celebrates 13 women’s history makers"

Image credit: Jan Vondrak