TEHRAN – A new species of bee discovered by a research team has been named after late Iranian mathematician “Maryam Mirzakhani”, ISNA reported on Monday.

Researchers in the Department of Plant Protection at Zabul University in recent years has focused on several groups of parasitoid bees, most of which are natural enemies of agricultural pests and are of great importance in pest biological control.

The bee family called Ichneumonids is one of the most important factors in the biological control of pests and includes more than 25,000 species worldwide, of which less than 500 species have been definitively registered in Iran.

During a four-year study, several other species of this valuable group of beneficial insects were collected and identified in different parts of east, west, and central Iran, some of which were previously unknown to the world of science.

Maryam Mirzakhani, Iranian-born genius mathematician and Stanford University professor, obtained her BSc in mathematics (1999) from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran. She then moved to the U.S. and finished a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004.

She won a gold medal in the Hong Kong International Mathematical Olympiad, in 1994, to be the first female Iranian student to have snatched a gold medal.

In the 1995 Toronto International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to win two gold medals.

In 2017, Mirzakhani, the winner of the Fields Medal, also known as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, succumbed to breast cancer at 40.

FB/MG