Roya Beheshti is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the Washington University in St. Louis. Roya was born in Tehran, Iran in 1977. Roya attended Tehran Farzanegan School, and it was this school where Roya met Maryam Mirzhakani.
Roya notes that Maryam was exceptional in every subject except math, until seventh grade. Roya recalls that in 7th grade, Maryam scored an 80 on a math exam. She tearfully tore up the exam results. When Maryam returned from summer break, she was suddenly exceptional in mathematics. She had an unwavering ability to concentrate on a problem and found multiple solutions to any given question.
When Roya reached high school, she -- along with Maryam -- became the first women to compete for Iran in the International Math Olympiad (IMO). Roya received a Silver Medal in the IMO in 1994, and was accepted to the prestigious Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, the foremost Iranian institution for Science & Mathematics. Roya recalls fond memories of her years in Sharif with Maryam: one on occasion, she and Maryam were assigned a take-home exam for a math class. The pair stayed up all night until 3 AM solving all but the last two problems. Roya resigned to sleep and urged Maryam to do the same, but when she woke up the next morning, she found Maryam at the same desk. Maryam gleefully announced that she solved the last two problems. Roya would later remniscence that it was this perseverance that would inspire her in mathematical pursuits later in life.
Roya proceeded to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT, whilst Maryam completed her Ph.D. on the other side of the Charles River. Roya completed in dissertation in 2003 on Lines of Fano Hyperspaces, proved that "the Hilbert scheme of lines on any smooth Fano hypersurface of degree 6 or less has the expectd dimension." Roya subsequently became a senior mathematics researcher at the Max-Planck Institute in Germany and a doscdoctoral fellow at Queen's University in Canda and at UC Berkely. In 2006, Roya became an Assistant Professor in Washington University in St. Louis.
