Maryam Mirzakhani: 1977–2017 Communicated by Hélène Barcelo and Stephen Kennedy Maryam Mirzakhani’s Harvard PhD dissertation under exhibits great depth of insight, wide-ranging technical Curt McMullen was widely acclaimed and contained al- mastery, and creativity and imagination of a very high ready the seeds of what would become her first three order. It earned her a Fields Medal in 2014. major papers. All three of these results—a new proof Mirzakhani was born on May 12, 1977, in Tehran and of Witten’s conjecture, a computation of the volume of grew up in postrevolutionary Iran during the Iran–Iraq the moduli space of curves, and an asymptotic count of War. One of four children, her father was an engineer, her the number of simple closed geodesics on a hyperbolic mother a homemaker. All three of her siblings became surface—were deep, beautiful, and unexpected. Subse- engineers. It was in middle school that she discovered her quent papers revealed the geometry and dynamics of the passion and talent for mathematics. In high school she moduli space of hyperbolic surfaces, culminating in the participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad, rigidity result achieved jointly with Alex Eskin. Her work winning gold medals in 1994 and 1995. She earned a For permission to reprint this article, please contact: bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Sharif University
[email protected]. in Tehran and headed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1090/noti1750 graduate study at Harvard. November 2018 Notices of the AMS 1221 Roya Beheshti Maryam Mirzakhani in Iran When we were teenagers, Maryam and I would often talk about where in life we wanted to be at forty.