IRNA – Minister of Education Fakhredin Danesh Ashtiani in a message extended condolences on demise of the late Iranian math genius Maryam Mirzakhani who succumbed to death on July 15.

In his message released on Saturday, Ashtiani said Mirzakhani was a star who kept the name of Iran alive.

Late Mirzakhani was definitely one of the most paramount scientists in the past 100 years in the world, the minister said.

The Iranian winner of Fields Medal, also known as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and Stanford University professor, Mirzakhani, passed away at 40 in a hospital in the US on Saturday.

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 in mathematics.