Passage 1: Maryam Mirzakhani was the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, the highest award given in mathematics (comparable to a Nobel Prize). During her high school years she won gold medals at the 1994 and 1995 International Mathematical Olympiads (with a perfect score on the 1995 exam), then earned her B.S. degree in mathematics in 1999 from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. In 2004 she received her Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University. In 2006 she was recognized as one of Popular Science's "Brilliant 10" extraordinary scientists. In 2008 she joined the faculty at Stanford University as a full professor of mathematics. According to Roya Beheshti, an algebraic geometer at Washington University in St. Louis, and a lifelong friend—the two friends talked math, read math, and did math, sometimes competitively. “Maryam’s work was inspired by a certain joy.” When Mirzakhani was in sixth grade, in Tehran, a teacher discouraged her interest in mathematics, noting that she was not particularly talented, not at the top of the class. A quarter century later, in 2014, she became the first woman and the first Iranian to win the Fields Medal-math’s highest honor. The whole mathematical community was deeply saddened by the untimely death of Maryam Mirzakhani on July 14, 2017 at the age of forty. People mostly remembered Mirzakhani as being fearlessly ambitious in her work, for her distinguished character in handling problems and for her humility. “It is still very hard to imagine that someone of her great energy, and brilliance could be taken away from us at such a young age,” said Eleny Ionel, professor and chair of the mathematics department at Stanford. Her sense for mathematics has touched so many lives and will continue to be an inspiration for many more. The word ‘comparable’ in the first paragraph is closest in meaning to ……….. .