Thursday, October 5, 2017

A00032 - Jalal Talabani, Iraqi Kurd Who Served as President of Iraq




Talabani, Jalal 
Jalal Talabani (b. November 12, 1933, Kelkan, Iraq — d. October 3, 2017, Berlin, Germany) was an Iraqi Kurdish politician who served as President of Iraq from 2005 to 2014. 

Talabani’s involvement in politics began at an early age. He joined the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) at age 14 and was elected to the KDP’s central committee at age 18. In 1956, he founded the Kurdistan Student Union, later becoming its secretary-general. After receiving a law degree from Baghdad University in 1959, Talabani served as the commander of a tank unit in the Iraqi army.

When the Kurds revolted against the government of 'Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1961, Talabani joined the resistance, leading a successful campaign to force the Iraqi army out of the district of Sharbazher. He subsequently undertook several diplomatic missions in Europe and the Middle East on behalf of the Kurdish leadership.

In 1975, Talabani and a group of Kurdish activists and intellectuals broke with the KDP and founded a new political party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. During the late 1970s and early ’80s, Talabani helped to organize Kurdish resistance to the Ba'thist regime of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.  Saddam’s successful military campaign against the Kurds (1987–88) forced Talabani to flee Iraq. Following the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Talabani returned to Iraq to help lead a Kurdish uprising against Saddam, which failed after United States led forces refused to intervene to support the rebels. Talabani subsequently worked with the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and France to establish a “safe haven” for Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan in the far north and northeast of the country.

After the overthrow of Saddam in the 2003 Iraq War, Talabani became a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, which developed Iraq’s interim constitution. In 2005, Talabani was elected interim president of Iraq by the National Assembly, and he was re-elected to a four-year term in 2006 and again in 2010. As president, Talabani worked to reduce sectarian violence and corruption within Iraq and to improve relations with Turkey, which had accused Iraq of allowing Kurdish rebels within Turkey to operate from bases in Iraqi Kurdistan. Talabani, suffering from poor health following a stroke in 2012, spent much of the last two years of his presidency receiving medical treatment in Germany. He was succeeded as president by another Kurdish politician, Fuad Masum.
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Thursday, September 7, 2017

A00031 - Shirin Ebadi, First Muslim Woman (Iranian) Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

Shirin Ebadi, (b. June 21, 1947, Hamadan, Iran), Iranian lawyer, writer, and teacher, who received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2003 for her efforts to promote democracy and human rights, especially those of women and children in Iran. She was the first Muslim woman and the first Iranian to receive the award.
Ebadi was born into an educated Iranian family; her father was an author and a lecturer in commercial law. When she was an infant, her family moved to Tehran.  Ebadi attended Anoshiravn Dadgar and Reza Shah Kabir schools before earning a law degree, in only three and a half years, from the University of Tehrān (1969). That same year she took an apprenticeship at the Department of Justice and became one of the first women judges in Iran. While serving as a judge, she also earned a doctorate in private law from the University of Tehrān (1971). From 1975 to 1979 she was head of the city court of Tehrān.
After the 1979 revolution and the establishment of an Islamic republic, women were deemed unsuitable to serve as judges because the new leaders believed that Islam forbids it. Ebadi was subsequently forced to become a clerk of the court. After she and other female judges protested this action, they were given higher roles within the Department of Justice but were still not allowed to serve as judges. Ebadi resigned in protest. She then chose to practice law but was initially denied a lawyer’s license. In 1992, after years of struggle, she finally obtained a license to practice law and began to do so. She also taught at the University of Tehrān and became an advocate for civil rights. In court, Ebadi defended women and dissidents and represented many people who, like her, had run afoul of the Iranian government. She also distributed evidence implicating government officials in the 1999 murders of students at the University of Tehrān, for which she was jailed for three weeks in 2000. Found guilty of “disturbing public opinion,” she was given a prison term, barred from practicing law for five years, and fined, although her sentence was later suspended.
Ebadi wrote a number of books on the subject of human rights. These include The Rights of the Child: A Study of Legal Aspects of Children’s Rights in Iran (1994), History and Documentation of Human Rights in Iran (2000), and The Rights of Women (2002). She also was founder and head of the Association for Support of Children’s Rights in Iran. In addition to writing books on human rights, Ebadi reflected on her own experiences in Iran Awakening: From Prison to Peace Prize, One Woman’s Struggle at the Crossroads (2006; with Azadeh Moaveni; also published as Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope).

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Tuesday, September 5, 2017

A00030 - Ibrahim Yazdi, Khomeini Advisor

Yazdi, Ibrahim
Ibrahim Yazdi, or Ebrahim Yazdi,  (Persian: ابراهیم یزدی‎‎; b. September 26, 1931, Qazvin, Iran – d. August 27, 2017, Izmir, Turkey) was an Iranian politician and diplomat who served as deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs in the interim government of Mehdi Bazargan,  until his resignation in November 1979, in protest at the Iran hostage crisis. From 1995 until 2017, he headed the Freedom Movement of Iran.
Yazdi studied pharmacology at the University of Tehran. Then he received a master's degree in philosophy again from the University of Tehran.
After the military coup of 1953, which deposed the government of Mohammad Mossadegh, Yazdi joined the underground National Resistance Movement of Iran, and was active in this organization from 1953 to 1960. This organization opposed to the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Yazdi traveled to the United States in 1961 to continue his education and in the United States, continued his involvement in political activities against the Shah.
Yazdi was co-founder of the Freedom Movement of Iran, Abroad, along with Mostafa Chamran, Ali Shariati, and Sadegh Qotbzadeh in 1961. They were all part of the radical external wing of the group. In 1963, Yazdi, Chamran and Ghotbzadeh went to Egypt and met the authorities to establish an anti-Shah organization in the country, which was later called SAMA, special organization for unity and action. Chamran was chosen as its military head before returning to the United States.  In 1966, Yazdi moved the headquarters of SAMA to Beirut.  In 1967, he enrolled at Baylor University and received a Ph.D. in biochemistry.  Yazdi became a naturalized United States citizen in Houston in 1971. 
Yazdi worked as a research assistant of pathology and research instructor of pharmacology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston until 1977. He also worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Houston.
In 1975, Yazdi was tried in absentia in an Iranian military court and condemned to ten years imprisonment, with orders issued for his arrest upon return to Iran. Because of his activities, he was unable to return to Iran and remained in the United States until July 1977. When Ayatollah Khomeini moved to Neauphle-le-Chateau, a Parisian suburb from Iraq in 1978, Yazdi also went to Neauphle-le-Château and began to serve as an advisor to the Ayatollah. He was also his spokesperson in Paris.
In 1978, he joined Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris where the latter had been in exile and became one of his advisors. He translated the reports of Khomeini into English in a press conference on February 3, 1979 in Tehran.  He was the deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs in the interim government of Mehdi Barargan,  until November 6, 1979. Yazdi proposed to celebrate 'Jerusalem Day' and his suggestion was endorsed by Khomeini in August 1979. In May 1980, he was appointed by Khomeini as head of the Kayhan newspaper.
On November 4, 1979, the United States embassy was taken over for a second time, this time by a group calling itself "Students Following the Line of the Imam (i.e. Ayatollah Khomeini)” and led by Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha, who had closer ties to certain revolutionary leaders.
As before, Yazdi was asked to go to the embassy and resolve the crisis. He asked and received permission of Khomeini to expel the occupiers, but shortly thereafter found out Khomeini had changed his mind and appeared on state television openly endorsing the takeover of the embassy. The entire cabinet of the interim government, including Yazdi and Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, resigned in protest the next day. They stated that they opposed the embassy takeover as “contrary to the national interest of Iran”.
The embassy takeover is considered to have been motivated in part by an internal struggle between various factions within the revolutionary leadership, with Yazdi and Bazargan on one side, and more radical clergy on the other. The embassy attackers, in subsequent statements indicated that one of their primary objectives in the takeover of the United States embassy in November 1979 was to force the resignation of Yazdi, Bazargan, and the entire cabinet.
Among the areas of conflict between the two factions was the behavior of the Revolutionary Courts and the Revolutionary Committees. Yazdi and Bazargan supported a general amnesty for all members of the Shah’s regime, provided that they cease to act against the revolution. They publicly opposed the secret trials and the summary executions carried out by the Revolutionary Courts, led by Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhaali.  Bazargan and other members of the interim government called for fair and open trials for those accused of crimes committed under the Shah’s regime. The radical clerics, on the other hand, stated that the rapid trials and executions were essential to protect the revolution.
After resignation from office, Yazdi and other members of the Freedom Movement of Iran ran in elections for the first post-revolutionary Islamic Consultative Assembly or parliament. Yazdi, Bazargan, and four other members of the Freedom Movement, namely Mostafa Chamran, Ahmad Sadr, Hashem Sabbaghian, and Yadollah Sahabi, were elected. They served in the parliament from 1980 to 1984.
After the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980, Yazdi fully supported the Iranian war effort against the invasion, but opposed the continuation of the war after the Iranian victory in Khorramshahr in 1982. The war continued for an additional six years. During these six years, Yazdi and others in the Freedom Movement issued several open letters to Ayatollah Khomeini opposing the continuation of the war. These letters and other public statements resulted in the firebombing of Yazdi’s residence in Tehran in 1985, and the arrest and imprisonment of several members of the Freedom Movement.
In subsequent elections in Iran for president, parliament, and city councils, Yazdi and other members of the Freedom Movement filed for candidacy but were barred from running by the Guardian Council, because of their opposition to policies and actions of the government.
After the death of Bazargan in January 1995, Yazdi was elected as leader of Freedom Movement of Iran. Under pressure from the revolutionary court prosecutor, Yazdi offered his resignation as FMI Leader on March 20,  2011 to the leadership council of the FMI. By the time of Yazdi's death the leadership council had yet to accept his resignation and Yazdi continued to function as the leader of the Freedom Movement of Iran.
Yazdi was arrested in December 1997 for "desecrating religious sanctities" and was freed on December 26 on bail.  Even after his release, he was barred from leaving the country for many years, and was summoned on a regular basis to answer questions before the revolutionary council, with his lawyer, Nobel Prize–winning Shirin Ebadi. 
On June 17, 2009, during the 2009 Iranian election protests, it was reported that Yazdi was arrested while undergoing tests at the Tehran hospital according to the Freedom Movement of Iran website. On June 22, Yazdi was released back to the hospital for a medical procedure. On December 28, 2009, Yazdi was arrested again in the wake of renewed protests, according to the Jaras reformist website.
Yazdi and several others were arrested on October 1, 2010 in Isfahan for participating in an "illegal Friday prayer." All others were freed within days. Ibrahim Yazdi remained in "temporary custody" — first in Evin prison and then in a "secure" facility under the control of Iran's security forces until March 2011. He was released in April 2011.
On August 27, 2017, Yazdi died of pancreatic cancer in Izmir, Turkey, where he was under treatment.  His body transferred to Iran and was buried in Behesht-e Zahra.  

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Tuesday, August 22, 2017

A00029 - Fadwa Suleiman, Syrian Actress and Activist

Suleiman, Fadwa
Fadwa Suleiman or Fadwa Soliman (b. May 17, 1970, Aleppo, Syria – d. August 17, 2017, Paris, France) was a Syrian actress of an Alawite descent who led a Sunni-majority protest against Bashar al-Assad's government in Homs.  She became one of the most recognized faces of the Syrian Civil War.

 Born in Aleppo, Suleiman moved to the capital Damascus to pursue an acting career where she performed in numerous plays, Maria's Voice and Media, and in at least a dozen TV shows, including in The Diary of Abou Antar and Little Ladies.  She also played an art teacher at an orphanage in Small Hearts, a television series that helped raise awareness about human organ trafficking and was broadcast by several Arab channels. She also acted in an Arabic adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House at the Qabbani theater in Damascus.

 At the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011, Suleiman was one of the few outspoken actresses against Assad's government. Knowing her fate would be death or prison, Suleiman wanted to participate in the demonstration to dispel what she said was public perception that all in the Alawite community, which comprised around 10 per cent of the Syrian population, supported Assad's government. She also wanted to dismiss the government's narrative that those who participate in protests were either Islamists or armed terrorists. She appeared at rallies demanding Assad's removal, sharing the podium with soccer star Abdelbasset Sarout, one of a number of Syrian celebrities who backed the revolt.

 Suleiman also delivered impassioned monologues to the camera, calling for peaceful protests to continue across the country until Assad was overthrown.  In one video message in 2011, Suleiman said security forces were searching Homs neighborhoods for her, and beating people to force them to reveal her hiding place. She cut her hair short like a boy, and moved from house to house to evade capture. In 2012, she fled with her husband via Lebanon and moved to France, where they resided in Paris. 

 On August 17, 2017, Suleiman died of cancer while in exile in Paris, aged 47.

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Thursday, August 3, 2017

A00028 - Jack Shaheen, Arab Christian Who Resisted Stereotyping of Arabs

Jack George Shaheen Jr. (b. September 21, 1935, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – July 9, 2017, Charleston, South Carolina) was a writer and lecturer specializing in addressing racial and ethnic stereotypes. He is the author of Reel Bad Arabs (adapted to a 2006 documentary), The TV Arab (1984) and Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture (1997).  Shaheen was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Christian Arab immigrants from Lebanon, and grew up in Clairton, Pennsylvania.  Shaheen graduated from Clairton High School in 1953. In 1957, he graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. In 1964, he received a master's degree from Pennsylvania State University.  In 1969, Shaheen received a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. Shaheen's work focused on racism and orientalism, particularly in popular culture such as Hollywood films.  He delivered over 1,000 lectures on the issue across the United States and on three continents.  Shaheen was also a former CBS News consultant on Middle East affairs, and professor emeritus of Mass Communications at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.  Shaheen received two Fulbright teaching awards. He was also the Distinguished Visiting Scholar at New York University's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.  Shaheen died on July 9, 2017 in Charleston, South Carolina.
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Wednesday, August 2, 2017

A00027 - Rula Quawas, Champion of Feminism in Jordan

Rula Quawas, Champion of Women’s Advancement in Jordan, Dies at 57

By RANA F. SWEIS







Rula Quawas in 2016 with students at the University of Jordan. Leen Quawas

Rula Quawas, a prominent academic and champion of women’s advancement in Jordan who was removed as dean of the University of Jordan over a video project in which her female students exposed the sexual harassment they endured on campus, died on July 25 in Amman, Jordan. She was 57.
The cause was complications of a biopsy she was having performed in which her aorta ruptured, her brother Audeh said.
Rula Butros Quawas (pronounced KWA-wahs) was born in Amman on Feb. 25, 1960, into a patriarchal society — women were not given the right to vote until 1974 — that as an adult she would refuse to accept.
“I always knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to write about women,” she said in a 2011 interview with Broad Recognition, an independent feminist blog at Yale. “Feminism is something that you drink and you eat every day; for me, it was a given.”
As a graduate student at the University of Jordan, she focused her studies on feminism in literature, particularly American literature. And as an associate professor there, she became the first academic to introduce courses in feminism. In 2006, she founded the university’s Women’s Studies Center.
“An educational system should give empowerment, skills to think critically, creatively, intelligently, the ability to contest, to challenge and to say, ‘I think not,” Professor Quawas said in an interview with The New York Times in 2014. “The whole paradigm of teaching needs to change. We are graduating robots.”
For the video project, in 2012, she helped students in her feminist theory class address the sexual abuse — cat calls, groping in public spaces, unwanted encounters by men trying to pick them up on the streets — that had become rampant in Jordan.
In the video, students held up signs bearing printed comments, many of them vulgar, that men had directed at women on campus. “Can I take you home?” read one sign. “Hottest gal in the middle,” read another.
The students hid their faces behind the signs. Their images were interspersed with scenes of men sitting on benches or standing along the sides of streets.



هذه خصوصيتي.flv Video by oualid amami

“Women do not want to be seen as a piece of meat but as a soul — as a mind, as a heart,” Professor Quawas said of the film project. “I have faith it will happen. Not in my lifetime, but it will happen.”
The video provoked a debate. Jordanian news media criticized her for encouraging students to confront harassment publicly, and conservatives on social media attacked her for allowing students to hold up signs with profane remarks. “I feel all of these eyes constantly piercing me, penetrating me, for something I believe in,” she said.
University administrators and some of her fellow faculty members said the video harmed the image and reputation of the institution. Professor Quawas was removed from her post as dean of the faculty of foreign languages but was allowed to continue to teach.
The Middle East Studies Association of North America sent a letter to high-ranking Jordanian government officials and the president of the university asking for her to be reinstated, but the university stood by its decision.
Later, more people came out in support of her effort, some apologizing for their initial silence. “After two years some of them would come and say, ‘We’re sorry, but we couldn’t,’” Professor Quawas said.
In 2013, she was named a Fulbright scholar in residence at Champlain College in Vermont. In Jordan, Princess Basma Bint Talal presented her in 2009 with a Meritorious Honor Award for Leadership and Dedication for her efforts to empower women. And she was a finalist for the State Department’s International Women of Courage Award in 2013.
In her youth, Ms. Quawas attended the private Al Ahliyyah School for Girls in Amman, where her mother, Hanneh Ghizawi, taught English. Her father, Butros Quawas, served in Jordan’s military intelligence.
She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English language and literature from the University of Jordan and a doctorate in American literature and feminist theory from the University of North Texas.
In addition to her brother Audeh, she is survived by her sister, Reem, and another brother, Ramez.
Professor Quawas sought to help emerging female Arab writers gain readerships through book launches and by writing critiques of their work.
“I understand that you can’t force feminism on people,” she told the online publication Hybris Media. “When a young woman comes to me and tells me, ‘I have wings, but I know I will never ever use them,’ that pains me.”

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*Rula Quawas, a prominent academic and champion of women’s advancement in Jordan who was removed as dean of the University of Jordan over a video project in which her female students exposed the sexual harassment they endured on campus, died in Amman, Jordan (July 25). 

Rula Butros Quawas (b. February 25, 1960, Amman, Jordan - d. July 25, 2017, Amman, Jordan) was born in Amman on Feb. 25, 1960, into a patriarchal society — women were not given the right to vote until 1974 — that as an adult she would refuse to accept.
Born and raised in Jordan, Rula Quawas graduated with a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of North Texas. At the University of Jordan, Professor Quawas began teaching a wide array of undergraduate and graduate courses pertaining to American Literature, one of which was a groundbreaking course on feminism, focusing on American feminism and its complexities. In addition, she has taught on Arab feminism and contemporary Arab women writers in translation for CIEE (Council on International Education Exchange). As founder of the Women's Studies Center at her university, she was the director for two years -- from 2006- 2008. In addition, she was the founder of Knowledge Production Unit at the Jordanian National Commission for Women in February of 2009. She also serves on many editorial boards such as the Journal of Women’s Entrepreneurship and Education, Studies in Literature in English, and the International Journal of Arabic-English Studies.
In the fall of 2012, Professor Quawas was removed from her position as Dean of Dean of the faculty of Foreign Languages at University of Jordan after a class project created by her students was uploaded to youtube. The video project entitled displayed women students holding signs that depicted insults and verbal harrassment that men have said to them in public.
Currently she is a Fulbright Scholar and scholar in residence for one year at the University of Champlain in Vermont starting in August 2013. There, Rula teaches courses pertaining to Arab feminisms and culture.
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Quawas, Rula
Rula Butros Quawas (b. February 25, 1960, Amman, Jordan - d. July 25, 2017, Amman, Jordan) was born in Amman, into a patriarchal society — women were not given the right to vote until 1974 — that as an adult she would refuse to accept.



Born and raised in Jordan, Rula Quawas graduated with a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of North Texas. At the University of Jordan, Professor Quawas began teaching a wide array of undergraduate and graduate courses pertaining to American Literature, one of which was a groundbreaking course on feminism, focusing on American feminism and its complexities. In addition, she has taught on Arab feminism and contemporary Arab women writers in translation for CIEE (Council on International Education Exchange). As founder of the Women's Studies Center at her university, she was the director for two years -- from 2006- 2008. In addition, she was the founder of Knowledge Production Unit at the Jordanian National Commission for Women in February of 2009. She also serves on many editorial boards such as the Journal of Women’s Entrepreneurship and Education, Studies in Literature in English, and the International Journal of Arabic-English Studies.




In the fall of 2012, Professor Quawas was removed from her position as Dean of Dean of the faculty of Foreign Languages at University of Jordan after a class project created by her students was uploaded to youtube. The video project entitled displayed women students holding signs that depicted insults and verbal harrassment that men have said to them in public.




In 2013, she was named a Fulbright scholar in residence at Champlain College in Vermont. In Jordan, Princess Basma Bint Talal presented her in 2009 with a Meritorious Honor Award for Leadership and Dedication for her efforts to empower women. And she was a finalist for the State Department’s International Women of Courage Award in 2013.
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Monday, July 17, 2017

A00026 - Maryam Mirzakhani, First Iranian and First Woman to Win a Fields Medal

Maryam Mirzakhani, Only Woman to Win a Fields Medal, Dies at 40

By KENNETH CHANG




Maryam Mirzakhani was awarded a Fields Medal in 2014. Stanford University

Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician who was the only woman ever to win a Fields Medal, the most prestigious honor in mathematics, died on Friday. She was 40.
The cause was breast cancer, said Stanford University, where she was a professor. The university did not say where she died.
Her death is “a big loss and shock to the mathematical community worldwide,” said Peter C. Sarnak, a mathematician at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study.
The Fields Medal, established in 1936, is often described as the Nobel Prizeof mathematics. But unlike the Nobels, the Fields are bestowed only on people aged 40 or younger, not just to honor their accomplishments but also to predict future mathematical triumphs. The Fields are awarded every four years, with up to four mathematicians chosen at a time.
“She was in the midst of doing fantastic work,” Dr. Sarnak said. “Not only did she solve many problems; in solving problems, she developed tools that are now the bread and butter of people working in the field.”
Dr. Mirzakhani was one of four Fields winners in 2014, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in South Korea. Until then, all 52 recipients had been men. She was also the only Iranian ever to win the award.
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran released a statement expressing “great grief and sorrow.”
He wrote, “The unparalleled excellence of the creative scientist and humble person that echoed Iran’s name in scientific circles around the world was a turning point in introducing Iranian women and youth on their way to conquer the summits of pride and various international stages.”
Dr. Mirzakhani’s mathematics looked at the interplay of dynamics and geometry, in some ways a more complicated version of billiards, with balls bouncing from one side to another of a rectangular billiards table eternally.
A ball’s path can sometimes be a repeating pattern. A simple example is a ball that hits a side at a right angle. It would then bounce back and forth in a line forever, never moving to any other part of the table.

MORE REPORTING ON MATHEMATICS


But if a ball bounced at an angle, its trajectory would be more intricate, often covering the entire table.
“You want to see the trajectory of the ball,” Dr. Mirzakhani explained in a video produced by the Simons Foundation and the International Mathematical Union to profile the 2014 Fields winners. “Would it cover all your billiard table? Can you find closed billiards paths? And interestingly enough, this is an open question in general.”

Maryam Mirzakhani: A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces Video by Quanta Magazine

In work with Alex Eskin of the University of Chicago, Dr. Mirzakhani examined billiards tables of more complicated shapes, and in fact considered the dynamics of balls bouncing around all possible tables that fit certain criteria.
It was a challenging problem that had been attacked by many prominent mathematicians. That included Curtis T. McMullen, her thesis adviser at Harvard and also a Fields medalist, who had solved a special case. But no one had a good idea of the path toward a more encompassing solution.
Amie Wilkinson, a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago, recalled sitting in on a meeting with Dr. Mirzakhani and Dr. Eskin. Whereas Dr. Eskin tended to be pessimistic, seeing all the potential pitfalls that could scuttle a proof, Dr. Mirzakhani was the opposite.
“Just pushing and pushing and pushing,” Dr. Wilkinson said. “Completely optimistic the whole time.’’
After a decade of work, Dr. Mirzakhani and Dr. Eskin proved not the original problem that they had set out to solve but a slightly different one.
“When these trajectories unwind,’’ Dr. Wilkinson said, “they reveal deep properties about numbers and geometry.”
Dr. Sarnak said that though Dr. Mirzakhani wrote relatively few papers, she was still a game changer. “I’m sure in the long run, she would have had many more of these decisive papers,” he said.


The front pages of Iranian newspapers on Sunday with pictures of Dr. Mirzakhani. Some news outlets took the unusual step of running a picture of her without a head covering. Atta Kenare/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In addition to being mathematically talented, “she was a person who thought deeply from the ground up,” he said.
“That’s always the mark of someone who makes a permanent contribution,” he added.
In an interview in 2014 with Quanta Magazine, published by the Simons Foundation, Dr. Mirzakhani, who described herself as a “slow” mathematician, acknowledged her tendency to take the harder path.
“You have to ignore low-hanging fruit, which is a little tricky,” she said. “I’m not sure if it’s the best way of doing things, actually — you’re torturing yourself along the way.”
Maryam Mirzakhani was born on May 3, 1977, in Tehran. As a child, she read voraciously and wanted to become a writer. Iran was at war with Iraq at the time, but the war ended as she entered middle school.
“I think I was the lucky generation,” she said in the Fields video, “because I was a teenager when things became more stable.”
In high school, she was a member of the Iranian team at the International Mathematical Olympiad. She won a gold medal in the olympiad in 1994, and the next year won another gold medal, with a perfect score.
After completing a bachelor’s degree at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran in 1999, she attended graduate school at Harvard, completing her doctorate in 2004. She then became a professor at Princeton before moving to Stanford in 2008.
Survivors include her husband, Jan Vondrák, who is also a mathematics professor at Stanford, and a daughter, Anahita.
Dr. Mirzakhani often dived into her math research by doodling on vast pieces of paper sprawled on the floor, with equations at the edges. Her daughter described it as “painting.”
“It is like being lost in a jungle,” Dr. Mirzakhani said, “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.”
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Top Math Prize Has Its First Female Winner

By KENNETH CHANG




Winners of the 2014 Fields Medal in mathematics, from left: Maryam Mirzakhani, Artur Avila, Manjul Bhargava and Martin Hairer. International Mathematical Union

An Iranian mathematician is the first woman ever to receive a Fields Medal, often considered to be mathematics’ equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
The recipient, Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor at Stanford, was one of four winners honored on Wednesday at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul, South Korea.
The Fields Medal is given every four years, and several can be awarded at once. The other recipients this year are Artur Avila of the National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Brazil and the National Center for Scientific Research in France; Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University; and Martin Hairer of the University of Warwick in England.
The 52 medalists from previous years were all men.
“This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians,” Dr. Mirzakhani was quoted as saying in a Stanford news release on Tuesday. “I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years.”
Ingrid Daubechies, a professor of mathematics at Duke and president of the International Mathematical Union, called the news “a great joy” in an email.
“All researchers in mathematics will tell you that there is no difference between the math done by a woman or a man, and of course the decision of the Fields Medal committee is based only on the results of each candidate,” she wrote. “That said, I bet the vast majority of the mathematicians in the world will be happy that it will no longer be possible to say that ‘the Fields Medal has always been awarded only to men.’ ”
Much of the research by Dr. Mirzakhani, who was born in Tehran in 1977, has involved the behavior of dynamical systems. There are no exact mathematical solutions for many dynamical systems, even simple ones.
“What Maryam discovered is that in another regime, the dynamical orbits are tightly constrained to follow algebraic laws,” said Curtis T. McMullen, a professor at Harvard who was Dr. Mirzakhani’s doctoral adviser. “These dynamical systems describe surfaces with many handles, like pretzels, whose shape is evolving over time by twisting and stretching in a precise way. They are related to billiards on tables that are not rectangular but still polygonal, like the regular octagon.”
Dr. Avila, 35, investigated a different area of dynamical systems, including an understanding of fractals. Dr. Bhargava, 40, was recognized for new methods in the geometry of numbers, especially prime numbers, and Dr. Hairer, 38, made advances in the study of the effect of random noise on partial differential equations, capturing the effect of turbulence on ocean currents or the flow of air around airplane wings.
While women have reached parity in many academic fields, mathematics is still dominated by men, who earn about 70 percent of the doctoral degrees. The disparity is even more striking at the highest echelons. Since 2003, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has awarded the Abel Prize, recognizing outstanding mathematicians with a monetary award of about $1 million; all 14 recipients so far are men. No woman has won the Wolf Prize in Mathematics, another prestigious award.
The Fields Medal was conceived by John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician, “in recognition of work already done” and as “an encouragement for further achievement.” Judges have interpreted the terms of the Fields trust to mean that the award should usually be limited to mathematicians age 40 or younger.
Dr. McMullen, himself a Fields medalist, did not speculate on why it had taken so long for a woman to be recognized. “I would prefer to look forward and celebrate this occasion,” he said, “and see it as a sign of positive trends in society and in science.”
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Maryam Mirzakhani (Persian: مریم میرزاخانی‎‎‎; 3 May 1977 – 14 July 2017) was an Iranian[7][8][1] mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.[9][10][11] Her research topics include Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry.[1]
On 13 August 2014, Mirzakhani became both the first woman and the first Iranian honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics.[12][13] The award committee cited her work in "the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".[14]
On 14 July 2017 Mirzakhani passed away at the age of 40, after being diagnosed with breast cancer.

Early life and education

Mirzakhani was born on 3 May 1977 in Tehran, Iran.[15] She attended Farzanegan School there, part of the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents.
In 1994, Mirzakhani achieved the gold medal level in the International Mathematical Olympiad, the first female Iranian student to do so. In the 1995 International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score and to win two gold medals.[16][17][18]
She obtained her BSc in mathematics (1999) from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. She went to the United States for graduate work, earning a PhD from Harvard University in 2004, where she worked under the supervision of the Fields Medalist Curtis McMullen.

Career

Mirzakhani was a 2004 research fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute and a professor at Princeton University.[19] In 2008 she became a professor at Stanford University.[20][14]

Research work

File:Remise de la médaille Fields à Maryam Mirzakhani.webm
Maryam Mirzakhani. August 2014
Mirzakhani made several contributions to the theory of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces. In her early work, Mirzakhani discovered a formula expressing the volume of a moduli space with a given genus as a polynomial in the number of boundary components. This led her to obtain a new proof for the formula discovered by Edward Witten and Maxim Kontsevichon the intersection numbers of tautological classes on moduli space,[9] as well as an asymptotic formula for the growth of the number of simple closed geodesics on a compact hyperbolic surface, generalizing the theorem of the three geodesics for spherical surfaces.[21] Her subsequent work focused on Teichmüller dynamics of moduli space. In particular, she was able to prove the long-standing conjecture that William Thurston's earthquake flow on Teichmüller space is ergodic.[22]
Most recently as of 2014, with Alex Eskin and with input from Amir Mohammadi, Mirzakhani proved that complex geodesics and their closures in moduli space are surprisingly regular, rather than irregular or fractal.[23][24] The closures of complex geodesics are algebraic objects defined in terms of polynomials and therefore they have certain rigidity properties, which is analogous to a celebrated result that Marina Ratner arrived at during the 1990s.[24] The International Mathematical Union said in its press release that, "It is astounding to find that the rigidity in homogeneous spaces has an echo in the inhomogeneous world of moduli space."[24]
Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014 for "her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".[25]The award was made in Seoul at the International Congress of Mathematicians on 13 August.[26]
At the time of the award, Jordan Ellenberg explained her research to a popular audience:
... [Her] work expertly blends dynamics with geometry. Among other things, she studies billiards. But now, in a move very characteristic of modern mathematics, it gets kind of meta: She considers not just one billiard table, but the universe of all possible billiard tables. And the kind of dynamics she studies doesn't directly concern the motion of the billiards on the table, but instead a transformation of the billiard table itself, which is changing its shape in a rule-governed way; if you like, the table itself moves like a strange planet around the universe of all possible tables ... This isn't the kind of thing you do to win at pool, but it's the kind of thing you do to win a Fields Medal. And it's what you need to do in order to expose the dynamics at the heart of geometry; for there's no question that they're there.[27]
In 2014, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran congratulated her for winning the topmost world mathematics prize.[28]
Mirzakhani has an Erdős number of 3.[29]

Personal life

Mirzakhani was married to Jan Vondrák, a Czech theoretical computer scientist and applied mathematician who is an associate professor at Stanford University;[30]their daughter is named Anahita.[31]
Mirzakhani described herself as a "slow" mathematician, saying that
You have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty of math.
To solve problems, Mirzakhani would draw doodles on sheets of paper, and write mathematical formulas around the drawings. Her daughter described her mother's work as "painting".
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.
— Maryam Mirzakhani, [32]

Death

Mirzakhani was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013.[33] After four years, it spread to her bone marrow.[34] Mirzakhani died from breast cancer on 14 July 2017 at the age of 40.[32][35][36]

Awards and honors


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Maryam Mirzakhani, (born May 3, 1977, Tehran, Iran—died July 15, 2017), Iranian mathematician who became (2014) the first woman and the first Iranian to be awarded a Fields Medal. The citation for her award recognized “her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.”
While a teenager, Mirzakhani won gold medals in the 1994 and 1995 International Mathematical Olympiads for high-school students, attaining a perfect score in 1995. In 1999 she received a B.Sc. degree in mathematics from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Five years later she earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University for her dissertation Simple Geodesics on Hyperbolic Surfaces and Volume of the Moduli Space of Curves. Mirzakhani served (2004–08) as a Clay Mathematics Institute research fellow and an assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton University. In 2008 she became a professor at Stanford University.
Mirzakhani’s work focused on the study of hyperbolic surfaces by means of their moduli spaces. In hyperbolic space, in contrast with normal Euclidean space, Euclid’s fifth postulate (that one and only one line parallel to a given line can pass through a fixed point) does not hold. In non-Euclidean hyperbolic space, an infinite number of parallel lines can pass through such a fixed point. The sum of the angles of a triangle in hyperbolic space is less than 180°. In such a curved space, the shortest path between two points is known as a geodesic. For example, on a sphere the geodesic is a great circle. Mirzakhani’s research involved calculating the number of a certain type of geodesic, called simple closed geodesics, on hyperbolic surfaces.
Her technique involved considering the moduli spaces of the surfaces. In this case the modulus space is a collection of all Riemann spaces that have a certain characteristic. Mirzakhani found that a property of the modulus space corresponds to the number of simple closed geodesics of the hyperbolic surface.
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