From The Wire:
Maryam Mirzakhani, First Woman and Iranian to Win Fields Medal, Dies at 40
Maryam Mirzakhani, the world’s first woman as well as the first Iranian to win the Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious prizes for mathematical research, passed away on July 15 after a four-year battle with breast cancer. She was only 40. News of her death on Saturday was confirmed by her relatives. Mirzakhani is survived by her husband Jan Vondrák, a theoretical computer scientist, and their daughter.
Mirzakhani had been teaching mathematics at Stanford University. Before that, between 2004 and 2008, she had been a research fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute, Peterborough (North Hampshire), and an assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton University, New Jersey. Mirzakhani had been awarded the Fields Medal in 2014 alongside Artur Avila, Manjul Bhargava and Martin Hairer. The citation for her medal singled out her work in “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”.
Her work overall dealt with such areas of mathematics as topology, dynamical systems and hyperbolic geometry (some of her papers are available to view here).
A brilliant mind taken from us too soon.
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