Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017). Iranian mathematician, first woman and first Iranian to win the Fields Medal (2014), for work on the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces — among the most visually cognitive areas of pure mathematics. Mirzakhani famously worked by drawing, covering large sheets of paper with sketches while her young daughter said her mother was "painting." She described her thinking as needing to see the mathematical structures rather than manipulate symbols, and her doctoral advisor described her as someone who could hold complex topological objects in mental rotation for hours at a time. The cognitive signature is the visual-spatial discovery mode operating at peak intensity in a domain that rewards exactly that mode. She died at forty from breast cancer. Her published work is still being unpacked by the mathematical community, and the techniques she developed for analyzing the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces have continued to generate research a decade after her death. The integration of her work into the mathematical canon was rapid — a sharp contrast with Ramanujan's experience a century earlier — because the contemporary research community had the apparatus to receive it.