But he kept plugging away and eventually rewrote the laws of Newtonian mechanics with his theory of relativity. He struggled at work initially, failing to get academic post and being passed over for promotion at the Swiss Patent Office because he wasn’t good enough at machine technology. He failed the general part of the entry test to Zurich Polytechnic – though they let him in because of high physics and maths scores. Einstein was slow to talk and was dubbed the dopey one by the family maid. Most Nobel laureates were unexceptional in childhood. Is her background unusual? Apparently not. He shared a famous maths problem from a magazine that fascinated her – and she was hooked. She loved novels and would read anything she could lay her hands on together with her best friend she would prowl the book stores on the way home from school for works to buy and consume.Īs for maths, she did rather poorly at it for the first couple of years in her middle school, but became interested when her elder brother told her about what he’d learned. Mirzakhani, did go to a highly selective girls’ school but maths wasn’t her interest – reading was.
Thankfully it ended around the time she went to secondary school. The only part of her childhood that was out of the ordinary was the Iran-Iraq war, which made life hard for the family in her early years. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, one of three siblings in a middle-class family whose father was an engineer. The child that takes maths GCSE while still in single figures, or a rarity such as Ruth Lawrence, who was admitted to Oxford while her contemporaries were still in primary school.īut look closer and a different story emerges. The ones reading Harry Potter at five or admitted to Mensa not much later. It would be easy to assume that someone as special as Mirzakhani must have been one of those gifted children who excel from babyhood.