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Assistant Professor Dor Minzer and graduate student Kai Zhe Zheng will be receiving a Best Paper Award at the June 24-28 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2024).

In their paper, Dor and Kai provide a near-optimal trade-off for so-called 2-prover 1-round games, which are crucial to proving strong inapproximability results.

Dor and others from our Department and MIT have other papers that have been accepted at the symposium. The symposium is the flagship conference of ACM’s SIGACT (Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory).

Congratulations, Dor and Kai!

Professor Emeritus Daniel J. Kleitman is among the 120 new members and 24 new international members elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Daniel, alongside Gian-Carlo Rota and Richard Stanley, shaped the field of combinatorics at MIT and beyond.

Members are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Membership is one of the highest honors that a scientist can achieve. They join 18 other NAS members in our department.

Congratulations, Daniel!

Elchanan Mossel has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2024.

He and six other MIT faculty members are among 250 leaders from academia, the arts, industry, public policy, and research elected this year by one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies.

Congratulations, Elchanan!

The School of Science has selected Mathematics Program Coordinator André Lee Dixon as one of the recipients of the 2024 Infinite Mile Award!

“I have been consistently struck by the level of initiative and passion André brings to work,” says his nominator, John Urschel PhD ’21.

Infinite Mile Award winners are nominated by colleagues for going above and beyond in their roles at the Institute.

Congratulations, André!

John Urschel PhD ’21 will receive the 2024 SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra Early Career Prize. He will be awarded this May at the SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra in Paris.

Established in 2017, this prize is awarded every three years to one post-PhD early-career researcher in the field of applicable linear algebra, for outstanding contributions within six years of receiving their PhD.

John was recognized for his work in linear algebra, using many different techniques from mathematics, such as random matrix theory, orthogonal polynomials, group theory, and optimization

Congratulations, John!

Ten PRIMES and RSI high school seniors won awards at the 2024 Regeneron Science Talent Search Competition!

PRIMES student Michelle Wei won 3rd Place ($150,000 scholarship) for her project “Solving Second-Order Cone Programs Deterministically in Matrix Multiplication Time,” mentored by EECS’ Guanghao Ye.

PRIMES and RSI student Alan Bu earned 10th Place ($40,000) for his RSI project, “On the Maximum Number of Spanning Trees in a Planar Graph with a Fixed Number of Edges: A Linear-Algebraic Connection,” mentored by Yuchong Pan. Each of them took prizes for math projects that finished within the top ten spots. Another PRIMES student became a finalist ($25,000), and seven other PRIMES and RSI students won national scholar awards.

Congratulations to the winners, and a big thank you to their mentors, PRIMES Chief Research Advisor Pavel Etingof, RSI Faculty Advisor David Jerison, and PRIMES/RSI head mentor Tanya Khovanova!