The award committee cited her work in "the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces". Stanford, California, U.S. On 14 July 2017, Mirzakhani died of breast cancer at the age of 40.

On that day, Iranian-American genius mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani died of cancer when she was only 40. In 2014, she won the prestigious Fields medal award for “her outstanding contribution” to building knowledge and understanding of the dynamics and the geometry of curved surfaces.

The award recognized Mirzakhani's “outstanding contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces, such as spheres, the surfaces of doughnuts and of hyperbolic objects”. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran in 1977.

Others argue that mathematics is a universal and exists independently of human consciousness and that we merely discover and uncover its truths. There is no one “correct” answer to this question, and different people may have different perspectives on it depending on their beliefs and experiences.