Acclaimed mathematician

Born: May 3, 1977;

Died: July 15, 2017

MARYAM Mirzakhani, who has died of breast cancer aged 40, was an acclaimed mathematician who was the first and only woman to win the Fields Medal. Sometimes called the Nobel Prize for Mathematics, the medal is only awarded every four years to between two and four mathematicians under 40.

Ms Mirzakhani was born in Iran and grew up during her country's war with Iraq. She demonstrated her talent for maths in high school when she was a member of the Iranian team at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1994 - she won a gold medal two years in a row.

After a bachelor's degree at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, she completed her doctorate at Harvard and joined Stanford University as a mathematics professor in 2008. Her work involved the geometric and dynamic complexities of curved surfaces such as spheres and doughnut shapes and she received the Fields Medal in 2014.

In a statement, Stanford said: “Mirzakhani specialised in theoretical mathematics that read like a foreign language by those outside of mathematics: moduli spaces, Teichmuller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry.

“Mastering these approaches allowed Mirzakhani to pursue her fascination for describing the geometric and dynamic complexities of curved surfaces, spheres, doughnut shapes and even amoebas – in as great detail as possible.”

Her work was sometimes explained in terms of a game of billiards. “You want to see the trajectory of the ball,” Ms Mirzakhani once explained. “Would it cover all your billiard table? Can you find closed billiards paths? And interestingly enough, this is an open question in general.”

Her work had implications in fields ranging from cryptography to “the theoretical physics of how the universe came to exist”, and Ms Mirzakhani was seen as an inspiration to other women to pursue maths and science as a career.

Ms Mirzakhani originally dreamed of becoming a writer but then shifted to maths. When she was working, she would doodle on sheets of paper and scribble formulas on the edges of her drawings, leading her daughter to describe the work as painting.

Ms Mirzakhani once described her work as “like being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some luck you might find a way out.”

Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne called Ms Mirzakhani a brilliant theorist who made enduring contributions and inspired thousands of women to pursue maths and science.

She is survived by her husband, Jan Vondrák, and daughter, Anahita