Into My Heart

Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. She was the first-ever female winner of the prestigious Fields Medal prize and the first Iranian to be honoured with the award.

Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran. She attended Farzanegan School, which was part of the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents. In both 1994 and 1995 she won the International Mathematical Olympiads for high-school students. In the 1995 International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score and to win two gold medals.

Mirzakhani continued her education at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, where she earned a BSc in Mathematics. After this, she undertook a  a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She worked under the supervision of the Fields Medalist Curtis T. McMullen, and her dissertation focused on Simple Geodesics on Hyperbolic Surfaces and Volume of the Moduli Space of Curves. She had a unique way of working, and “would spend hours on the floor with supersized canvases of paper, sketching out ideas, drawing diagrams and formulae, often leading Anahita [her daughter] to say, “Oh, Mommy is painting again!” Mirzankhani said that “I don’t have any particular recipe [for developing new proofs] … It is like being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some luck you might find a way out.”

From 2004 to 2008 she was a Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellow and an assistant professor at Princeton University. She then became a professor at Stanford University where she specialized in theoretical mathematics including moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry.” 

In 2014, Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal prize for her work on complex geometry and dynamic systems, becoming the first-ever female winner and the first Iranian to be honoured with the award. During her lifetime, she won a number of awards including the 2009 Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics and the 2013 Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society. She worked up until her death in 2017, and was still producing amazing mathematics during her battle with cancer over the last few years.

If I told you Misha Collins had secretly written six novels, you’d think “well, that figures” and you’d think it was pretty cool. Misha is interesting.

If I told you I’d written six novels, which is the truth, you’d think I was lying or bragging.

People don’t like talented women. They don’t like a woman who wears too many hats. They don’t want to hear about what she can do—they only want to hear other people validate her while she insists she’s not that great.

I have a literature degree. I’m a Shakespeare scholar. I’m a Beowulf and Chaucer scholar. I’m an art history scholar. I’m a linguistics scholar. I’m a graphic artist. I’m a typographer. I’m an editor. I’m a certified writing instructor. I’m an amateur astronomer and geologist. I’ve written novels and poems. I’m an award winning artist. I can play the drums. I can speak French.

Are you annoyed? Why is a capable woman annoying, but meanwhile fangirls write lists of men’s accomplishment as proof he’s worth idolizing?

in short, im gay