A Sad, Bittersweet, Convergence

Maryam Mirzakhani

     It has been a week since the University of Chicago Middle Eastern Music Ensemble (MEME) Persian Concert. As noted before in this blog, the Persian Concert is so popular that it is presented two evening. The other two concerts, the Turkish and Arab, are only presented one evening. In my view, this is because of the wonderful support of the Iranian community and also the talent of the amazing singers in this concert: Sam Taheri and Gilda Amini.
     As with all MEME concerts, I find a few of the selections running through my head for weeks after the concert. It is no doubt due to the intense rehearsals building up to the last practice, the dress rehearsal, and the concert all happening over three days. This time Bazgastheh, Hezar Dastan, and Peyk-e Sahari have been a non-stop sound track in my mind. These love songs came with me from Chicago to the Czech Republic. The same happens with every concert. I remember that after the Arab Concert in May of 2017, I could not stop humming Farid Al Atrash’s Ahbabina ya Aini. That soundtrack was with me all summer long. 
     It is Sunday morning in Prague. It is a rainy March day. Before leaving the hotel to go to an Armenian Church service, I was watching the BBC World News. As chance would have it, they aired a segment on the famous Iranian Mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani. She is the first women and the first Iranian to win the prestigious Field Medal of the International Mathematical Union. The award is presented at their international congress which takes place every four years. It is given to the best mathematicians under the age of forty and is very prestigious. Some refer to it as the Nobel Prize for mathematicians. The BBC portrayal was titled Algebra’s Daughter: Maryam Mirzakhani. 
     I was vaguely aware of Dr. Mirzakhani. The BBC show was fascinating and described her rise through the Iranian education system to reach the highest levels in a field, research mathematics, dominated by men in a country, Iran, where men seem to have an advantage over women in society in general. She was born in 1977. Dr. Mizrakhani earned her bachelor’s in mathematics from the Sharif University of Technology in 1999. She then went on to Harvard to earn her PhD in 2004. She went on to become a fellow at Princeton and then she became a professor at Stanford. She married a Czech native and another professor at Stanford, Jan Vodorak. They had a daughter Anahita who was a constant companion of Dr. Mizrakhani per the BBC portrayal. In 2013, this brilliant lady was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was saddened to learn that she passed away in 2017, joining other brilliant mathematicians, Galois, Abel, and Ramanujan, that were taken from the world too soon. She passed at the same age, 40, as the famous German mathematician Bernard Riemann. Eerily, she was awarded her Field Award in 2014 in part for her work in Riemann Surfaces. 
     As the BBC documentary ended, the sound track was a beautiful piano version of a song we played in the Persian Concert, Jane Mayram. It was beautiful, that brought a shiver up my spine and a tear to my eye. This lovely song has been in my head, heart, and soul the rest of this day…

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