If anyone needs any background info on her work, there are a number of sources gathered here: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/08/links-on-maryam-m

If anyone needs any background info on her work, there are a number of sources gathered here: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/08/links-on-maryam-mirzakhani-first-fields.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/08/links-on-mar... It includes this, a quote that is the best laymen's explanation of her work that I could find: Mirzakhani became fascinated with hyperbolic surfaces — doughnut-shaped surfaces with two or more holes that have a non-standard geometry which, roughly speaking, gives each point on the surface a saddle shape. Hyperbolic doughnuts can’t be constructed in ordinary space; they exist in an abstract sense, in which distances and angles are measured according to a particular set of equations. An imaginary creature living on a surface governed by such equations would experience each point as a saddle point. It turns out that each many-holed doughnut can be given a hyperbolic structure in infinitely many ways — with fat doughnut rings, narrow ones, or any combination of the two. In the century and a half since such hyperbolic surfaces were discovered, they have become some of the central objects in geometry, with connections to many branches of mathematics and even physics.