Sad news this weekend as we learned of the death of brilliant mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani to metastatic breast cancer.
Reading her obituaries, as well as older biographical articles, is inspiring, especially the story of how she started out as a teenager with not much mathematical inclination but lots of determination.
It’s heartening to see how Iranian newspapers honoured her by breaking the no-hijab taboo, and that some parliamentarians are calling for amendments to the law so that Maryam’s 6-year-old daughter can visit her mother’s home country.
I confess that I barely followed the mathematical descriptions of geodesics on hyperbolic surfaces in the articles about Maryam, so in her honour I went out and bought a book on non-Euclidean geometry called “When Straight Lines Become Curves”. It’s part of a Maths series that is currently ongoing – if you see any issues languishing on the bottom shelf at your newsagent’s, I do encourage you to rescue one and give it a shot – it’s written with “normal” people in mind!
I leave you with this 3-minute micro-documentary published in 2014, the year in which Maryam became the first woman ever (and so far, the only woman ever) to win the Fields Medal, which is sort of like a Nobel prize for mathematics.