Who drew mathematics on giant sheets of paper, and whose daughter thought she was painting.
Click inside the disk to place points · geodesics connect them · click outside to clear
She worked on the floor. Giant sheets of paper, unrolled across the room like bolts of fabric, and she would kneel over them and draw — curves, arcs, surfaces folding into themselves. Her daughter Anahita would watch from the doorway of the Stanford office and later tell people that her mother was a painter. She was not wrong.
What she drew were the shortest paths across impossible surfaces — Riemann surfaces, hyperbolic planes, the moduli spaces that parameterize every possible geometry a surface can carry. The disk above is her territory: the Poincaré disk model, where straight lines become arcs, where infinity curves inward, where parallel lines diverge forever. She moved through this space the way a composer moves through sound — by feel, by structure, by an intuition that took years to earn and could not be taught.
In 2014, she became the first woman to win the Fields Medal in its 78-year history. Iranian-born, trained at Tehran’s Farzanegan school for gifted students, then Sharif University, then Harvard under Curtis McMullen. She moved through institutions the way geodesics move through hyperbolic space — along paths that appear curved from outside but are the straightest possible lines from within.
Breast cancer. Forty years old. July 14, 2017. Iran broke protocol and published photographs of her without hijab. The International Mathematical Union declared her birthday — May 12 — the International Day of Women in Mathematics. The surfaces she studied are still being explored. The drawings remain.