Girls Can Do Anything Inspirational Women - Maryam Mirzakhani
Maryam Mirzakhani - Mathematician (Iran)
Nobel
prize winner for maths, 2014
Girls Can Do Anything is a picture book written by me and illustrated by Ali Pye, publishing on 2 August this year.
It is a book about all the things that girls can do and about some of the things they might aspire to do when they grow up. It is a book about dreams and, to demonstrate to children that their dreams are achievable, the book includes a Gallery of Inspirational Women - women who are living the lives that our children may dream about.
In the book, we tell children that some girls like maths, but how many female mathematicians have you heard of?
OK, you may not have heard of many mathematicians at all, but I’m fairly sure the ones you have heard of are male. Come on, let’s do a quick google search and see…OK, we have Archimedes, Newton, Einstein, Pythagoras, Fibonacci…you get the picture.
Amazingly, a couple of women do come up in the search. I’ve found Ada Lovelace, arguably the first person to realise the potential of algorithms in computing in the 1850s and the world’s first computer programmer. Then there’s Sophie Germain, who did some pioneering work on Fermat’s last theorem. But they’re both historic figures and for the Girls Can Do Anything gallery of inspirational women, I wanted to find someone who represents mathematics today. Someone young and funky that children could identify with and look up to.
I first
heard about Maryam Mirzakhani just after her death from cancer in 2017. She was
only 40, which struck me as a terrible waste.
Of course, any death, especially at a young age, is a waste, but she
stuck in my mind. Maryam Mirzakhani was
a brilliant Iranian mathematician who worked at Stanford University in the USA.
The photograph that accompanied the article was of a confident, bright woman
who looked...well.. normal. It was her normality that struck me, I think.
She wasn’t a fusty old relic from the past, or a socially-inept academic. She
was a normal human being who happened to be brilliant at maths. So brilliant that she was the first woman to
win the Fields medal in maths for her work on super-whizzy things like
hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and other brain boggling stuff that only
the super-mathsy clever people will understand.
I am not one of those people, but I did like maths at school and
perhaps I’d have had more confidence
that maths was a great thing to enjoy, if I’d had someone like Miryam to look
up to.
And that's why Miryam Mirzakhani deserves a placed in our Gallery of Inspirational Women.
Check back tomorrow to see who else is on our list!
Girls Can Do Anything is illustrated by Ali Pye and published on 2 August 2018 by Scholastic. Pre-order your copy here.