When Maryam Mirzakhani was a mathematics graduate student at Harvard University in 2003, she went to her adviser, Curtis McMullen, with a question. McMullen had just solved a longstanding problem related to the behaviour of billiard balls on a type of abstract table that can be folded up into a doughnut surface with two holes. It was a major discovery, but Mirzakhani asked why he had proved it just for surfaces with two holes, rather than for complex surfaces with even more. She was drawn to the largest possible problem - even if she had no idea, back then, just how hard it would be to solve. "Maybe sometimes not knowing enough is a blessing," she says, "because then you just do your thing."
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