original to:
<https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jul/29/maryam-mirzakhani-great-artist-mathematician-fields-medal-howard-jacobson>
The world has lost a great artist in mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani
Howard Jacobson
The Guardian, Saturday 29 July 2017
‘Maryam Mirzakhani’s death will be felt by poets as well as
mathematicians.’
The mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani died two weeks ago. She was 40. I
had never heard of her before reading about her death in the papers.
It’s a piercingly sad story: Iranian-born, and latterly a professor at
Stanford University, Mirzakhani was the only woman to have won the
Fields medal, the equivalent for a mathematician of the Nobel prize, and
is survived, in newspaper-speak, by a husband and a daughter.
I always find the locution “survived by” too cruel to bear. So final the
rupture, no room for error: she’s gone, they’re left. And, in this case,
how young the mother and the wife.
It is a sad story for other reasons, too, not least the intensity of
Mirzakhani’s expression in the photograph most of the papers used. There
is a beauty that can only be described as that of the mind’s migration
to the face, the transfiguring beauty of exceptional intelligence. So
it’s a double loss: the premature loss of a person and the premature
loss of her genius.
I remember there being an unspoken qualitative distinction at school
between those who were good at maths and science – the priests of
numbers and symbols – and the more poetical of us, whose medium, as
Wordsworth had it, was the language of men talking to men. The
assumption, at least on the part of us Wordsworthians, was that
creativity was all on our side. I have since come to think the word
“creative” has much to answer for. Among the freedoms it sometimes gave
us was the freedom from structure, knowledge and the obligation to
convince.
Howard Jacobson: ‘My personal trainer has me doing tai chi’
Read more
Mirzakhani, it is said, considered being a writer before turning to
mathematics. It is unlikely she believed she’d made a choice in favour
of an inferior, or less artistic, discipline. And she expressed her
immersion in mathematics in language every writer will recognise – “like
being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge you can
gather to come up with some new tricks, and with luck you might find a
way out”.
The luck, of course, is no such thing. It’s the mystery Keats called
“negative capability”, the trust that the work will do itself if only we
dare to plunge without irritability or insistence into the dark, not
sure we will find a way out at all. The best writing happens in this
way, unintended, unknowing, grateful and surprised. Such abnegation of
will is what we mean by creativity. So the mathematician and the artist
are companioned in the same dark, and do obeisance to the same gods. The
pity of Mirzakhani’s death will be felt by poets as well as
mathematicians.
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