Although those implications are foreign to many of us, Mirzakhani’s pursuit of them—and the poetic way in which she described her process—made her a role model, as Quartz’s Zach Wener-Fligner wrote when she won the Fields Medal in 2014:

Mirzakhani is a welcome inspiration for girls and young women enticed by the more rigorous, theoretical side of STEM. PALO ALTO, Calif. — Maryam Mirzakhani, 40, a renowned mathematician and Stanford University professor best known for being the first woman to receive the prestigious Fields Medal for mathematics, died Saturday, the university announced. Mirzakhani, the newspaper stated, died on July 15 at the age of 40. “She was a master of curved spaces,” said Manjul Bhargava about celebrated fellow mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who died on Saturday at age 40 after a battle with breast cancer. But also a daughter, a mother and a wife," he added in a subsequent post.Mirzakhani, a professor at in California, after she had been battling for four years spread to her bone marrow, Iranian media said.In 2014 Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Mathematics, which is awarded by the Congress of Mathematicians.The award recognized her sophisticated and highly original contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces such as spheres.Born in 1977 and raised in Tehran, Mirzakhani initially dreamed of becoming a writer, but by the time she started high school her affinity for solving mathematical problems and working on proofs had shifted her sights. “Mastering these approaches allowed Mirzakhani to pursue her fascination for describing the geometric and dynamic complexities of curved surfaces — spheres, doughnut shapes and even amoebas — in as great detail as possible.”

The work had implications in fields ranging from cryptography to “the theoretical physics of how the universe came to exist,” the university said. “I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years.”

Ms. Mirzakhani — known for taking the difficult, complicated path to solve mathematical problems — studied the symmetry of curved surfaces and other theoretical concepts known as “pure mathematics.” She joined Stanford in 2008, where she was a mathematics professor until her death. Ms. Mirzakhani once described her work as “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.”

Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne called Ms. Mirzakhani a brilliant theorist who made enduring contributions and inspired thousands of women to pursue math and science. Her contributions as both a scholar and a role model are significant and enduring, and she will be dearly missed here at Stanford and around the world.”

Mirzakhani is survived by her husband and a daughter.
Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman and first Iranian to win the Fields Medal in mathematics, dies at 40 of breast cancer.