IRNA – The Iranian winner of Fields Medal, also known as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and Stanford University professor, Maryam Mirzakhani, passed away at 40.


NASA scientist Firooz Naderi wrote in a tweet, “A light was turned off today. It breaks my heart … gone far too soon.”

In 1994, Mirzakhani won a gold medal in the Hong Kong International Mathematical Olympiad, to be the first female Iranian student to have received a gold medal. In the 1995 Toronto International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to receive a perfect score and to win two gold medals.

She obtained her BSc in mathematics (1999) from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran. She went to the US and got a PhD from Harvard University in 2004.

Mirzakhani (b. May 3, 1977) was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013, a year before she set the record of the first ever woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal.