Iranian newspapers break hijab taboo in tribute to Maryam Mirzakhani

The Iranian media in its tribute to late mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani on Sunday broke the country's strict rules on female dress to show Mirzakhani with her head uncovered.

According to a report by the Guardian, tributes were led by Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, who posted a recent picture of Mirzakhani on Instagram without a hijab.

Mirzakhani, a Stanford University professor, died in hospital in California on Saturday fighting cancer.

She won the Fields Medal in 2014 for her "outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".

Iranian newspapers digitally retouched Mirzakhani's photograph to put a scarf over her head while others published a sketch showing only her face. Iran's strict laws on female dress require all women to be covered in public.

The front page of Hamshahri, a state newspaper, particularly stood out, winning praise for portraying her as she had lived. "Maths genius yielded to algebra of death", read its headline over a picture of Mirzakhani without a hijab.

In another tribute to Mirzakhani, a group of Parliamentarians in Iran on Sunday urged the speeding up of an amendment to a law that would allow children of Iranian mothers married to foreigners to be given Iranian nationality so that Mirzakhani's daughter could visit Iran.

Mirzakhani is survived by her Czech scientist husband and her daughter, but a marriage between an Iranian woman and a non-Muslim man was previously not recognised, complicating visits to Iran by their children.

-ANI