TEHRAN – The University of Isfahan has named the faculty of mathematics and statistics after Maryam Mirzakhani, the genius mathematician who died of cancer in 2017 when she was only 40.

Mirzakhani was born in Tehran in May 1977. In 1994 and 1995 she was awarded gold medals by Iran’s Mathematical Olympiad. She received her bachelor’s degree in science from Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology in 1999 and was given a scholarship from Harvard University, where she completed a PhD in 2004.

She became a professor of mathematics at Stanford University in 2008, at the age of 31.

In 2006, Popular Science magazine named Mirzakhani on its annual Brilliant 10 list. In 2009 she won the American Mathematical Society’s Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics. Her other awards include the 2013 Satter Prize in Mathematics and the 2014 Clay Research Award.

At the urging of the Iranian Mathematical Society’s Women's Committee, the International Council for Science declared Mirzakhani's birthday, May 12, as the International Women in Mathematics Day in respect of her memory.

In 2022, the University of Oxford launched the Maryam Mirzakhani Scholarships, which provide support for female mathematicians pursuing doctoral studies at the university.