Dr. Maryam Mirzakhani, 1977-2017. She was the first woman & first Iranian to win the Fields Medal. She saw math beyond the numbers. Her work is entirely visual and very creative. When she won the Fields Medal, mathematicians were excited about how she made connections in math that had never been made before.
Did you know that her 7th-grade teacher told her, that she couldn't do math? Imagine what would have happened if she had believed this teacher. The world would have lost out on her brilliance.
Read more about her: https://www.nature.com/articles/549032a