February 28, 2020
A UN agency has named the late Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani as one of seven women scientists “who have shaped our world.”
The UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) anointed Mirzakhani, who passed away of cancer at age 40 in 2017, on February 15, the International Day of Women and Girls in STEM — science, technology, engineering, and math.
“Although Mirzakhani passed away in 2017, her invaluable contributions to the field of mathematics endure, and her trailblazing career has paved the way forward for many women mathematicians to come,” UN Women said in a statement.
Mirzakhani, a leading scholar on the dynamics and geometry of complex surfaces, became the first and to date only woman to win the most prestigious award in mathematics, the Fields Medal, in 2014. It is often called the Nobel Prize of math.
Mirzakhani moved to the United States to do her graduate studies and stayed. She was a Stanford University professor at the time of her death.
Among the other women named by UN Women were Marie Curie, the Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who died in 1934, and was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for her work on modern nuclear science.
Also named was Katherine Johnson, 101, an African-American NASA scientist, Johnson was one of NASA’s “human computers” whose calculations helped send American astronauts into space in the 1960s.