<nettime> Howard Jacobson: The world has lost a great artist in mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani (Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

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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