Maryam Mirzakhani’s Pioneering Mathematical Legacy

The publicity-averse Maryam Mirzakhani, who died Friday, is the only woman ever to win the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor.Photograph by Mariana Cook The Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who died on Friday, at the age of forty, was known to her colleagues as a virtuoso in the dynamics and geometry of complex surfaces—“science-fiction mathematics,” one admirer called it—and to her young