Maryam Mirzakhani

Known to the general public for having been the first female recipient of the Fields Medal, Maryam Mirzakhani is often described by those who crossed her path as tenacious, shy and exceptional in more ways than one. From her brilliant studies in Tehran to her distinguished career at Stanford, passing through her various successes at the International Mathematical Olympiads, her meteoric trajectory is recounted by filmmaker George Cziczeri in his documentary The Secrets of the Surface. We have attempted, in this feature, to give an overview of her work on the geometry of surfaces and the importance of her results.

Just as a word is composed of letters, a number is made up of digits. Our positional decimal system (which uses ten digits, whose position in the writing of the number matters) is a way — quite powerful — to represent a number. But what effects can be obtained by manipulating this sequence of digits? The creativity brought by some in the search for answers to this question opens the door to a new universe. You will discover happy, narcissistic or palindromic numbers, the notions of persistence, some intriguing properties of prime numbers... and many other curiosities.