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The FOCS 2024 (Foundations of Computer Science) conference awarded several MIT Math community members with Test of Time awards for the most impactful papers from 30, 20, and 10 years ago.

• In the 30-year category, awards were given to Peter Shor PhD ’85 for his algorithms for quantum computation, and for discrete logarithms and factoring; and to Michael Sipser and his then-advisee Dan Spielman PhD ’95, a former Department professor, who were recognized for their expander codes.
• Elchanan Mossel and his coauthors received the 20-year Test of Time award for optimal inapproximability results for Max-Cut and other two-variable constraint satisfaction problems.
• In the 10-year category, EECS Professor and Math doctoral candidate adviser Virginia Vassilevska Williams was recognized for her work on the relationship between popular conjectures in dynamic algorithms.

The annual FOCS Test of Time Awards recognize papers published in the Proceedings of the Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

Congrats to Dan, Elchanan, Mike, Peter, and Virgi for these recognitions!

Senior Kenta Suzuki will receive the 2025 AMS-MAA-SIAM 2025 Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student, for “extraordinary research in the representation theory of p-adic groups.”

According to the AMS, Kenta’s papers, including two solo works, represented “significant progress in different areas of the field.” Kenta worked on deep problems in representation theory, and he has authored and coauthored six research papers. His results include asymptotics for the dimension of spaces fixed by a congruence subgroup in an admissible representation of GL(n).

Kenta has made important contributions to the representation theory of p-adic groups and is also studying geometric representation theory. Suzuki is particularly interested in applying geometric methods to solve problems of representation theory. From Tokyo, Japan, and Plymouth, Michigan, Suzuki spends his free time running, reading, and learning how to cook.

Among others, Kenta thanked his mentors, and professors Zhiwei Yun, Wei Zhang, whose “unwavering support has motivated me to explore many areas of mathematics,” and Roman Bezrukavnikov, whose “every conversation left Kenta “with new ideas.”

Kenta will be receiving his award at January’s 2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle.

Congratulations, Kenta!

The provost has selected three senior faculty members to the following five-year named professorships as of July 1, 2024: Alexei Borodin, Barton L. Weller (1940) Professorship; Davesh Maulik, Norman Levinson Professorship; and Philippe Rigollet, Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professorship.

Assistant Professor Dor Minzer has been appointed to the Cecil and Ida B. Green Career Development Professorship, for a three-year term.

These named professorships are funded from endowed gifts to the Institute or the Department, and constitute a significant honor for their holders.

Congratulations Alexei, Davesh, Philippe and Dor!

The Department welcomes three assistant professors as of July 1: Shaoyun Bai, Jacopo Borga, and Christoph Kehle.

Shaoyun specializes in symplectic topology and is interested in problems interacting with neighboring fields. After receiving his PhD from Princeton University under the supervision of John Pardon, Shaoyun held short-term visiting positions at MSRI (now SLMath) and the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics. Most recently he was the Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University.

Previously the Szegö Assistant Professor at Stanford, Jacopo is interested in probability theory and its connections to combinatorics and mathematical physics. Jacopo received his PhD in Mathematics from the Institut für Mathematik of the Universität Zürich, under the supervision of Valentin Feŕay and Mathilde Bouvel. In 2022, he received the Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award, and in 2023, the Bruno de Finetti Award.

Christoph is interested in analysis, partial differential equations, and general relativity, with recent research focused on the formation and dynamics of black holes. After receiving his PhD in 2020 from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Mihalis Dafermos, Christoph was a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and a junior fellow at ETH Zurich’s Institute for Theoretical Studies.

Please welcome Christoph, Jacopo, and Shaoyun!

Former instructor Zilin Jiang, Jonathan Tidor '17 PhD '22, graduate student Yuan Yao, Shengtong Zhang ’22, and Professor Yufei Zhao '10, PhD '15 received the 2024 Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize from the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Optimization Society. They were recognized for their paper "Equiangular lines with a fixed angle," published in 2021 by Annals of Mathematics.

The Fulkerson Prize is awarded every three years for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics.

Congratulations, Jonathan, Shengtong, Yuan, Yufei, and Zilin!