Jul 27, 2017
The brilliant Stanford professor, killed by breast cancer at 40, worked with shapes unconstrained by the real world
In her thesis Mirzakhani solved a problem that sounds straightforward but which is actually extremely difficult to answer: On a given hyperbolic surface, how many simple loops are there of less than a given length?
Her thesis advisor, Curtis McMullen, a mathematics professor at Harvard, recalls that a few weeks after finding a solution she came to him with a surprising announcement, she had used her work to find a new proof of the Witten conjecture, an important result in string theory.