The world has lost a great artist in mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani

She was the only woman to have won the Fields medal, maths' equivalent of the Nobel prize

The mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani died two weeks ago. She was 40. I had never heard of her before reading about her death in the papers. It's a piercingly sad story: Iranian-born, and latterly a professor at Stanford University, Mirzakhani was the only woman to have won the Fields medal, the equivalent for a mathematician of the Nobel prize, and is survived, in newspaper-speak, by a husband and a daughter.

I always find the locution "survived by" too cruel to bear. So final the rupture, no room for error: she's gone, they're left. And, in this case, how young the mother and the wife.