Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to bend the curve

The award recognized Mirzakhani's “outstanding contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces, such as spheres, the surfaces of doughnuts and of hyperbolic objects”. 

Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran in 1977. Her childhood dream of becoming a writer was replaced by another passion: maths. As a high school junior, she was among the first Iranian women to qualify for the International Mathematical Olympiads, where she won two gold medals. After graduating from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, she moved to the United States where she earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004. In 2009, she became a professor of mathematics at Stanford University in California.

Today, Mirzakhani is a global icon for women in science. "I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years," Mirzakhani said in 2014. Sadly, she was not there to witness the second woman to win the Fields Medal in 2022: Ukrainian Maryna Viazovska. Maryam Mirzakhani died in 2017 of breast cancer at the age of 40. 

Described as one of the greatest mathematicians of her generation, several mathematics prizes have been named after her, including the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize and the Maryam Mirzakhani Price in Mathematics, and her birthday is commemorated by the May12 initiative which brings together events celebrating women in mathematics.