The Mirror and the Map traces the extraordinary journey of Maryam Mirzakhani — from a young girl sketching patterns on a fogged mirror during the Iran-Iraq War to a visionary mathematician mapping the infinite curves of the universe. A reflection of genius and resilience, MARYAM tells the story of how one woman turned imagination into geometry, and exile into boundless discovery.
From war-torn Tehran to the rarefied halls of Harvard and Stanford, MARYAM follows the rise of Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the Fields Medal — mathematics’ highest honor. Her journey is one of vision and sacrifice as she fights to break the glass ceiling and claim her place in history.
As a teenager during the Iran-Iraq War, Maryam traces numbers on the steamed glass of a bathroom mirror — secret escapes from the air-raid sirens and grief outside. Amid ration lines and ruined streets, she discovers a deeper refuge in numbers. At the International Mathematical Olympiad, one of the few girls competing, she stuns the world with back-to-back gold medals — even as tragedy shadows her path when classmates are lost in a devastating bus crash. From this crucible, she carries an unshakable sense of destiny.
In America, she sheds one life for another. At Harvard, under the guidance of Curtis McMullen — brilliant, exacting, relentless — Maryam is pushed toward problems that humble the boldest minds. McMullen recognizes her fearless ambition and encourages it, even as his high standards drive her deeper into solitude. Where others see walls of symbols, she sees patterns unfurling across curved surfaces, maps of hidden worlds she sketches in sprawling arcs. The brilliance is intoxicating — but isolating.
And then she meets Jan Vondrák, a Czech mathematician and fellow outsider. What begins as a meeting of minds grows into love, pulling her out of solitude and grounding her in the possibility of a life beyond mathematics. For the first time, her destiny is not only hers to carry. With love, family, and unrelenting drive, she begins to redraw the map of geometry itself.
But just as her greatest work emerges, with the birth of her daughter, illness strikes. Racing against time, Maryam transforms mathematics with daring elegance — work that secures her the Fields Medal, shattering barriers as the first woman ever to receive it.
MARYAM is a human epic: a story of exile and belonging, fearless ambition born of hardship, and a woman who turned the infinite into her legacy.
Impact
Maryam will be told with the intimacy of a character-driven drama and the sweep of a global journey. Like Lion, it moves from the intensity of childhood in Tehran to adulthood in the West. Like The Theory of Everything, it balances romance and intellectual discovery with the devastating reality of illness. And in the spirit of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it explores creativity itself — how Maryam envisioned mathematics not as numbers but as landscapes of imagination.
Maryam Mirzakhani’s life has a cinematic arc: from war-scarred Tehran to the corridors of Harvard and Stanford, where she broke through barriers that had excluded women from mathematics’ highest honors. Nearly a decade after The Man Who Knew Infinity brought Ramanujan’s story to audiences worldwide, Maryam offers the opportunity to inspire a new generation — especially young women in a field still dominated by men.
By producing this film through Infinity Arts, we will ensure an uncompromising commitment to authenticity — the very heart of our mission. More than a story about mathematics, Maryam is about resilience, love and the human cost of greatness. Her discoveries inspired awe among mathematicians, while her life story — intimate, tragic and profound — will move audiences everywhere.