Mirzakhani a source of honor to Iran, Islam: Ali Akbar Salehi

Iran's Head of Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi told the media that the late Iranian math genius, Maryam Mirzakhani, was an honor for Iran and the Islamic world.

In the memorial ceremony of Mirzakhani in Tehran, Salehi remarked that the Iranian professor, who recently passed away due to cancer recurrence, was a source of honor.

“Professor Mirzakhani was an excellent privilege to the humanity,” asserted the official.

Born in 1977 in Tehran, Mirzakhani won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad (Hong Kong, 1994) and the International Mathematical Olympiad (Canada, 1995).

She received a BS in mathematics from Iran’s prestigious Sharif University of Technology in 1999 and then went to the US where she earned her PhD degree from Harvard University in 2004.

In 2008, the math-wiz became full professor of mathematics at Stanford University at the age of 31.

Mirzakhani received the Blumenthal Award from the American Mathematical Society in 2009, the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics in 2013, and the Clay Research Award in 2014.

The most important part of her achievements was her 2014 Fields Medal, viewed as the highest honor a mathematician can receive, which is given every four years to mathematicians under the age of 40. She won the prize in recognition of her contributions to the understanding of the symmetry of curved surfaces.

FM/AI