My memories of Maryam Mirzakhani:

Last time when I saw her she was so happy with her little girl Anahita,  and my impression was that she was so much struggling to keep her mother-daughter relation safe of all sorts of things related to her image as a first women ever winning Fields medal. At this moment the sadness of a 6 year old girl losing her mother is the greatest motivation for me to write these lines of my memory of her.
   I participated maths Olympiads in 1993 and right after started my undergraduate course at  Sharif university. I became one of the responsibles for geometry problems of the maths Olympiad team for the next two years in which Maryam twice won gold medal (a great honor for me). Right at the beginning of the first problem solving sessions,  I understood  that I have the tough job of finding more challenging geometry problems which might keep the  team members like Maryam  thinking  for a while. They  were solving problems very fast and I was soon running  out of problems. I never got to know her beyond her talent in mathematics, and my conversations with her never crossed beyond lines, circles, equalities and inequalities in maths. There could have been the discussion of  such things  in the Iranian society. However, at that time I was too much limited to my own circle of ideas and beliefs rooted in my culture and childhood education.
    The next news of her came to me in March 1998. I was at that time in Rio trying to adapt myself to the new ambient and culture.  The bus carrying  the team of Sharif university for the annual Iranian mathematics competition for university students  in Ahvaz  crashed into a ravine. She was in the bus  and survived. It was a great moment of happiness seeing the survivors and sadness remembering  those of my friends who passed away. One of them was Reza Sadeghi Silver and Gold medal in 1994 and 1995 maths Olympiads, the same years in which Maryam got two Golds.  Until the year before and for two consecutive years I also participated in such a competition. In 1999 when I visited Iran I met her in Sharif university. She has already recovered from the memories of the bus crash and was preparing  herself to go to US.
     Many years passed and since I went to do my Ph.D at IMPA, Rio de Janeiro, I lost contacts with many of my friends, including her,  who went to US.  This was until 2014 in which I went to Harvard for a sabbatical year. It was November 2014 and the next month  we were planning to return back to Rio.  I knew that she is coming for a conference. Some colleagues  in the past several months  invited her to conferences and got no answer. I was pretty sure that she was busy with tons of email filling  her Stanford
mailbox. Anyway, I dared and I wrote an email to her to join our families for a dinner, a simple spaghetti.  "Anahita loves spaghetti", She replied from her gmail account after a week or so. "I am still overwhelmed by my full mailbox (and teaching!),  and unfortunately I miss more important emails quite often...". 
   We joined our families sometime in the late November.  She started talking about her intentions to visit Iran for which she has to apply for a  Visa for Anahita. She told that she was very eager to travel to Iran, but after so many emails from the persons related to the government (and the opposition outside Iran), she had to cancel her travel plans, and did not
know when once again could be able take her family to Iran. At some point she started to talk about a group of Iranians who complained of her, why she at some point has said that in Iran there are good public schools,  because they have interpreted this in favor of the government. As it was clear each day she had to put a considerable amount of time, going  through her full mailbox,  sorting out which emails she  has to reply.
   She wanted  the right to have the time for her family and in particular to her daughter, in the same time, she was aware of  the great responsibility  that she has in front of her. She had a very correct decision of cutting showman like aspects of her post-Fields medal era. But still it was too much pressure on her to keep the balance of her privacy and her public duties.
   She was very interested that Anahita learns Spanish, and for this, she had hired a Peruvian  nanny. We told both Anahita and Omid (my son) to speak each other in Spanish, but it didn't work. English was dominant. She showed a lot of interest to have a visit of Peru (my wife's country), so that Anahita practices her Spanish.  At some point we hopped to gather our families in Peru, sometime in the future, and I told her about IMCA, a mathematics institute at Lima. We mainly talked about kids, how they grow fast,  how they makes us happy (and sometime angry!). I did not even dare to talk  about her cancer, as I thought it must destroy the happiness of the moment. In someway, I was trying to convince myself that she is recovering from the cancer, and every thing was going Ok. 
   A friend of mine in Iran once told me: "The politicians do not listen to us, but they will listen to Maryam, that is why we were interested to bring her back to Iran. In this way we might be able to improve the quality of science in Iran". He was right. However, in a society like Iran in which you mainly see black and white, and divide people into good or bad,  those  who go to hell and those who go to sky, and there is no intermediate between, how she could enjoy the visit of her homeland.  Just a picture with a politician would be enough reason for many of us to talk non-sense staff.
   My last meeting with Maryam is filled with her memories, not only as a great mathematician, but also as a great mother who  could put all her glory aside and give her daughter the attention  she needed. But in the same time,  being aware of her  responsibility as  the first woman  Fields medalist. And of course, meantime fighting against her cancer.  Emmy Noether's life and the way she was treated in Germany,  became a lesson for the next generations, and I hope that, we will take  lessons from her short life too.

Hossein Movasati
IMPA, Rio de Janeiro, 19 July 2017.