John Baez (Aug. 13, 2014)
Recommendation for Growth of the number of simple closed geodesics on hyperbolic surfaces Share on Google+
For topics: #geometry
Maryam Mirzakhani won the Fields medal yesterday.
As a child in Tehran, she didn’t intend to become a mathematician – she just wanted to read every book she could find! She also watched television biographies of famous women like Marie Curie and Helen Keller. She started wanting to do something great… maybe become a writer.
She finished elementary school while the Iran-Iraq war was ending, and took a test that got her into a special middle school for girls. She did poorly in math her first year, and it undermined her confidence. “I lost my interest in math,” she said.
But the next year she had a better teacher, and she fell in love with the subject. She and a friend became the first women on Iranian math Olympiad team. She won a gold medal the first year, and got a perfect score the next year.