Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani is a well known mathematician. She is an Iranian professor at Stanford University in California in United States of America. Maryam Mirzakhani is the first female among the 56 winners of Fields Medal since it was established in 1936. The Fields Medal is often described as the "Nobel Prize of Mathematics. She became the first woman to ever win this medal.
Maryam Mirzakhani completed her doctoral thesis in 2004, in her research she  answered the question of developing a formula for 'how the number of simple geodesics of length L grows as L gets larger'. 


Along the way, she also built links to two other major research questions by solving both of them. One was related to a formula for the volume of the so-called “moduli” space — the set of all possible hyperbolic structures on a given surface and the second was a surprising new proof of an old conjecture proposed by famous physicist Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, about certain topological measurements of moduli spaces related to string theory.

Maryam Mirzakhani is married to Jan Vondrák, a Czech theoretical computer scientist who works at IBM Almaden Research Center. They have a daughter named Anahita.