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Talent continues to leave Iran in droves

The untimely death of Iranian-American math genius Maryam Mirzakhani gives rise to renewed debate on the issue of "brain drain" in Iran.
A picture taken in the capital Tehran on July 16, 2017 shows the front pages of Iranian newspapers bearing portraits of the top female scientist Maryam Mirzakhani, who died of cancer a day earlier. 
Iranian-born mathematician, who became the first woman to win the coveted Fields Medal in 2014, died on July 15 in a US hospital after the breast cancer she had been battling for four years spread to her bone marrow, at the age of 40. / AFP PHOTO / ATTA KENARE        (Photo credit should read ATTA KENARE/AFP/Get

Seven exceptionally talented Iranian math students lost their lives in a bus crash on March 17, 1998. One of them was enrolled at Tehran University, while the others were studying at Sharif University of Technology. They had all won awards in national and international Olympiads and were returning from the 22nd Mathematics Competition for Students at Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, in southwestern Iran.

The bus that crashed into a ravine 20 years ago was carrying other passengers who survived. One of them was Maryam Mirzakhani, the Iranian-American winner of the 2014 Fields Medal (equivalent to the Nobel Prize in mathematics). Mirzakhani, who emigrated to the United States to continue her education at Harvard University a few years after the crash, died from cancer on July 14.

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