Jane's Pocket Change: It All Adds Up
Note: This week’s Pocket Change is excerpted from Jane’s opening remarks to the community. For full transcript please click here.
I would like to personally welcome all of you to our new school year and to our extraordinary community. As we embark upon this year together, I will share the advice that I shared with our students, faculty, and staff—be open to all possibilities. If you believe that all possibilities are open to you, learning and growing without limits, doesn’t it feel good—sort of relaxing and empowering all at once?
Note: This week’s Pocket Change is excerpted from Jane’s opening remarks to the community. For full transcript please click here.
I would like to personally welcome all of you to our new school year and to our extraordinary community. As we embark upon this year together, I will share the advice that I shared with our students, faculty, and staff—be open to all possibilities. If you believe that all possibilities are open to you, learning and growing without limits, doesn’t it feel good—sort of relaxing and empowering all at once?
I also want to tell you a little about this person:
Maryam Mirzakhani was born in Iran in 1977. She won gold medals in 1994 and 1995 in the high school International Mathematical Olympiads, gaining a perfect score in 1995. She earned her B.Sc in Tehran and five years later a Ph.D from Harvard University for her dissertation Simple Geodesics on Hyperbolic Surfaces and Volume of the Moduli Space of Curves. After doing further research and teaching at Princeton University Mirzakhani became a professor of mathematics at Stanford University in 2008.
Sadly, Mirzakhani died this summer of breast cancer at the age of 40.
During her short time on this earth, Mirzakhani’s undaunted desire to pursue the hardest endeavors; her adept synthesis of multiple approaches to mathematics; and her deep commitment to understanding something new led to work that will affect disciplines and worlds way beyond her field of theoretical math—including cosmology and cryptography.
It is this combination of passion and genius that led Mirzakhani to win the Fields Medal, pretty much the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in math, in 2014. She was the first woman, and the first Iranian, to do so since its inception in 1936.
In a news release in 2014, the following was said of Maryam Mirzakhani:
“Fluent in a remarkably diverse range of mathematical techniques and disparate mathematical cultures, she embodies a rare combination of superb technical ability, bold ambition, far-reaching vision, and deep curiosity.”
Her life and work hold so many important lessons for us here at CSW:
- What do we learn from being first, from breaking the stereotype?
- What level of respect can we give to someone with deep intellectual abilities?
- Are we comfortable in environments that do not immediately appear to welcome us, and how do we establish ourselves in new territory?
The Cambridge School of Weston is a progressive high school for day and boarding students in grades 9–12 and PG. CSW's mission is to provide a progressive education that emphasizes deep learning, meaningful relationships, and a dynamic program that inspires students to discover who they are and what their contribution is to their school, their community and the world.