TheCable

Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to receive the Fields Medal for Mathematics, has lost a four-year battle against breast cancer.

The 40-year-old was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013, which had spread to her bone marrow.

Mirzakhani got the Fields Medal for Mathematics in 2014 for her work on complex geometry and dynamical systems. She was the first female recipient since the award’s establishment in 1936.

Fields Medal for Mathematics, which is nicknamed ‘Nobel Prize for Mathematics,’ is awarded every four years to 2-4 mathematicians under 40.

Firouz Naderi, her friend and NASA scientist, confirmed Mirzakhani’s death on Instagram.

“A light was turned off today. It breaks my heart… gone far too soon,” she wrote.

The mathematics professor, who was born in 1977, won a gold medal in the 1994 International Mathematical Olympiad, the first female Iranian student to do so.

A year later, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score and win two gold medals at the Olympiad.

Mirzakhani is survived by Jan Vondrák her husband who is a Czech theoretical computer scientist and associate professor at Stanford University, and a daughter named Anahita.