Imagine trying to map the surface of a donut. Now imagine that donut is constantly warping and stretching, and one wrong calculation collapses the entire universe of possible shapes into infinite fractal chaos. That is the world Maryam Mirzakhani lived inside, and she found order in it. This episode is a deep dive into the life of the Iranian mathematician who became the first woman and the first Iranian to win the Fields Medal.

We trace the path: a teenager in Tehran who twice won gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad, a Sharif University undergraduate, a Harvard PhD with Curtis McMullen, and a career at Princeton and Stanford spent on the geometry of moduli spaces, Riemann surfaces, and Teichmüller dynamics. We unpack her landmark work on the volume of moduli spaces, the counting of simple geodesics on hyperbolic surfaces ...