It is with great sadness that the London Mathematical Society (LMS) has learned of the death of Fields Medal winner Maryam Mirzakhani at the age of 40. In 2014 Mirzakhani became the first woman to receive a Fields Medal in its nearly 80-year history. She received the award for her ‘outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces’. In essence, for her contributions to the fields of topology, geometry, and dynamical systems.
Mirzakhani was born in Tehran in 1977 and obtained her BSc in Mathematics (1999) from the Sharif University of Technology. She then moved to the US to begin her doctorate work with Curtis McMullen at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in 2004. From 2004 to 2008 she was a Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellow and an assistant professor at Princeton University. She had been a professor of mathematics at Stanford since 2008. While she dreamed of being a writer as a young girl, she chose to follow her passion for solving mathematical problems.
Professor Mirzakhani was awarded Honorary Membership of the LMS in 2015 and also served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Topology published by the LMS. The Society would like to pass on its sincere condolences to her family and friends.