From Omar Khayyam to Mirzakhani – Iran’s beautiful minds

Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani speaks during a news conference following the Fields Medal award ceremony at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul, 13 August 2014.
Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani speaks during a news conference following the Fields Medal award ceremony at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul, 13 August 2014.

Presenting a more nuanced vision of their common homeland, Iran, to Western imaginations, kindred spirits Omar Khayyam and Maryam Mirzakhani stand out against the twenty-first century backdrop of anti-Iranian sentiment and Islamophobia. By Hamid Dabashi

Essay by Hamid Dabashi

"The Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who died on 14 July 2017, at the age of forty, was known to her colleagues as a virtuoso in the dynamics and geometry of complex surfaces – 'science-fiction mathematics', one admirer called it – and to her young daughter, Anahita, as something of an artist." 

Siobhan Roberts’ words in the New Yorker sums up in simplest terms the sudden sense of loss and quiet mourning millions of Iranians around the world and, with them, the world of science at large felt at the tragic ending of a beautiful mind so early in its blooming.  

World-renowned mathematician and professor of mathematics at Stanford University Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017), the first woman to win Fields Medal prize, passed away battling cancer. Born and raised in Iran, Mirzakhani became a globally celebrated mathematician soon after she obtained her BSc in mathematics in 1999 from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran.

She travelled to the United States for her graduate studies, earning her PhD from Harvard University in 2004. She was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014 for her "outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces". Her death left her immediate family, her friends and colleagues, and with them her nation, at a loss for words. 

 

Complicating the global image of a nation

 

Many of the reactions to Mirzakhani's death were both normal and predictable. The Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the President of Stanford University Marc Tessier-Lavigne both issued solemn statements of condolence. The Iranian media competed in showering her with accolades. The Iranian oppositional venues in the United States and Europe began to use and abuse the occasion to denounce the Islamic Republic for its various policies, especially for the conditions conducive to "brain drain".

 

Maryam Mirzakhani left Iran to pursue her advanced mathematical studies in the United States. Had she been born a thousand years ago, she would have gone to Baghdad to do so – and she would have probably gone to Beijing were she to have been born just a couple of decades from now.

 

The question of "brain drain" is, of course, a serious malady in Iran and many other similar countries. But Maryam Mirzakhani was no "brain drain". Hers was a superior intelligence and she travelled where she could nourish it best – and that travelling did not suddenly turn her into this strange thing called "Iran-born", instead of just plain "Iranian".

 

But something else, something quite simple and significant, was also happening, just like Maryam Mirzakhani herself, gently and quietly.

 

Both upon their global recognitions and – perforce – upon their early and tragic passing, markedly brilliant minds and beautiful souls like Maryam Mirzakhani become a symbol, a sign, a citation far beyond who they are, and what they have achieved in their professional calling. From the time that she achieved her coveted Fields Medal, Maryam Mirzakhani began to complicate the global image of her homeland, against the backdrop of the pervasive demonisation of Iran by one brand of warmongering or another.Warmongers prefer to keep things simple

 

Nations need to be simplified if they are to be targeted for military strikes. Afghanistan was reduced to Mullah Omar. Iraq was reduced to Saddam Hussein. The more the image of a nation is complicated, the more difficult it is for warmongers in Washington, Tel Aviv, or Riyadh to target it for destruction.

 

Precisely in the quiet dignity of her work, her avoidance of publicity like the plague, the tiny, cancer-ravaged body of Maryam Mirzakhani shone like a beautiful star on the dark planet of her earthly life. An Iranian, a Muslim, a woman of modest middle-class background, rising gloriously to put a big brilliant question mark in front of everything that was being mobilised against her people

 

Those who exonerate the Iranian people, when targeting “Iran” for demonisation, should take a look at what they have done to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Libya before believing their own delusions. Ordinary people, not governments, are the primary targets and the final victims of war-mongering anywhere and everywhere.

 

To be sure, much to the chagrin of warmongers, the image of Iran has been complicated by other prominent Iranians, in particular, those who have put Iranian cinema on the global map. I recall vividly when another accomplished Iranian young woman, Samira Makhmalbaf first appeared at Cannes Film Festival aged seventeen for the premiere of her film "Apple" in 1998. She too succeeded that year, seriously altering the image of Iran from that of a bearded angry man to a gifted young woman.

 

In the realm of art, no-one, of course, did more to complicate the image of Iran than the late master Abbas Kiarostami, who was the principal engine bringing the rest of Iranian art to global attention.

 

[embed:render:embedded:node:24357] But much of that complexity has been in the realm of arts, not sciences. In the realm of science, the only thing publicly related to Iran is, of course, the nuclear scientists who are regularly targeted for assassination.

Mirzakhani was not a nuclear physicist. A breed apart, she was a world-renowned mathematician. Her accomplishments, as a result, assume entirely historical proportions comparable with other Iranian and Muslim scientists at the historical level of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi and, above all, of Omar Khayyam, the towering astronomer and mathematician.

 

Mirzakhani’s resurrection of her homeland's historical legacy alerted the world to a whole different register of consciousness about Iran as a Muslim country, under circumstances which, owing to pervasive Islamophobia in the U.S., meant even Rumi was being read as if he were a New Age guru from California. Mirzakhani is comparable to Omar Khayyam not just because they were both Iranian mathematicians. Like Khayyam, Mirzakhani has also complicated the vision of their common homeland in the European and now the American imagination in unpredictable ways.

 

The reputation of Omar Khayyam as a poet hugely outstrips his fame as a mathematician. But the difference is only on the surface. The beauty of Khayyam’s mathematical mind, it now seems, needed to be translated, as it were, into poetic scepticism to be registered by mortal beings, whereas Maryam Mirzakhani’s poetry was and remains in pure mathematics.

 

Khayyam’s mathematics was sublated into his poetry for a larger aesthetic register:

 

               "But helpless pieces in the game He plays

               Upon this chequer-board of Nights and Days

               He hither and thither moves, and checks … and slays

               Then one by one, back in the Closet lays"

Yet if Khayyam’s penchant was for the poetic absurdity of being, Maryam Mirzakhani inhabited the poetic precision of her numbers. “I like crossing the imaginary boundaries people set up between different fields – it’s very refreshing,” she once said.“There are lots of tools, and you don’t know which is going to. It’s about being optimistic and trying to connect things.” Mirzakhani crossed imaginary boundaries in mathematics the way other poets do with the very mystery of life itself. 

The mathematician, poet, painter 

On another occasion she admitted: “Of course, the most rewarding part is the ‘Aha’ moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new – the feeling of being on top of a hill and having a clear view. But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight”. That is the mind of a mathematician in the soul of a poet. That is Khayyam incarnate.  

Statue of the Iranian poet, astrologer and philosopher Omar Khayyam, born 1048 in Nizhapur / Iran, died 1131 ibid. in Nizhapur (photo: ISNA)
Mirzakhani is comparable to Omar Khayyam not just because they were both Iranian mathematicians. But because like Khayyam, Mirzakhani too complicates the vision of their common homeland in the European and now American imagination in unpredictable ways

Mirzakhani’s mathematical equations were her poetry – a poetry only a happy few can decipher to their delight. The world at large remains baffled at the beauty of that poetry. Another and more recent kindred soul of Mirzakhani was, of course, the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920), who also died tragically young at the age of 32. 

The famous story narrated by Ramanujan’s English colleague, the prominent mathematician GH Hardy, is now known as “Hardy-Ramanujan number 1729”. According to Hardy, he was once going to see Ramanujan when he was bedridden. Hardy had just ridden in a cab number 1729 and upon arrival, he remarked to his friend that the number seemed to be quite dull and that he hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. “No”, Ramanujan replied: “It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways”. The two different ways are: 1³ + 12³ and 9³ + 10³. 

Now, that is pure poetry – for what is poetry, other than a truth so obviously beautiful that mortals cannot see it. The joyous eyes of Maryam Mirzakhani’s little daughter could see what her mother’s beautiful mind knew with mathematical precision: “At the family’s home, near Stanford University,” Roberts tells us in her essay on the Iranian mathematician, “Mirzakhani would spend hours on the floor with supersized canvases of paper, sketching out ideas, drawing diagrams and formulae, often leading the young Anahita to exclaim, ‘Oh, Mummy is painting again!” 

At the summit of her sublime mathematical visions, Maryam Mirzakhani left us too brutally early for her full story to unfold and yet, thanks to Anahita (named after Avestan, the old Persian goddess of fertility, healing, and wisdom), she has left us some idea of what she was trying to bequeath us. 

Hamid Dabashi

© Al-Jazeera 2021

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.