Maryam Mirzakhani IQ

Maryam Mirzakhani was born in Tehran in 1977 and grew up after the Iran-Iraq war. At a school for gifted girls she discovered mathematics, and she won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1994 and 1995, the second with a perfect score. After a degree at Sharif University she earned a Harvard doctorate and became a professor at Stanford. In 2014 she became the first woman to win the Fields Medal. She died of cancer in 2017, aged 40.

No test score is known. LifeScore lists about 160 as an editorial marker, range 145 to 175. It rests on a perfect olympiad score at 18 and work on curved surfaces that earned the most prestigious prize in mathematics.

For work on the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces, which describe all possible shapes of a curved surface. Among other results, she counted how the number of simple closed loops on such surfaces grows with length.

She said she was not. She described herself as slow and preferred to think about a problem for a long time, sketching and exploring. Her career shows that depth and persistence matter at the top of mathematics as much as speed.

Mirzakhani combined many areas, geometry, topology and dynamics, to attack a single question. She worked visually and slowly, building intuition with drawings before proving results. Her career is a strong counter-example to the idea that brilliance means speed.

What supports it

• Her IMO results are recorded by the International Mathematical Olympiad.
• She received the Fields Medal at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians.
• She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016.

What it cannot prove

• Olympiad scores reward speed under time pressure, which she said was not her style.
• Achievement reflects education, opportunity, persistence and collaboration as well as raw reasoning ability.
• An editorial marker is a comparison aid built from achievement, not a measurement, and two careful readers could place it ten points apart.

Maryam Mirzakhani's IQ is represented here by a retrospective estimate of 160, not a verified test result. Maryam Mirzakhani is best known for exceptional geometric imagination. The useful question is what the surviving evidence shows, not whether a precise modern score can be recovered.

Quiet, patient and imaginative. She described herself as a slow mathematician who loved the long journey.

The dominant archetype here is The Explorer. This archetype shapes decision patterns: what feels natural, what creates friction, and what blind spots tend to emerge.

Estimated IQ is 160. This is a rough estimate based on documented accomplishments and contemporary accounts, not a literal measurement.

Her birthday, 12 May, is now marked as International Women in Mathematics Day.

Maryam Mirzakhani's estimate of 160 falls in the profoundly gifted IQ range. Want your own number rather than Maryam's? Take the free IQ test or the quick IQ test. See what an IQ of 160 means, place it on the IQ chart or check how rare it is with the IQ rarity calculator.