Four PRIMES/RSI Students Receive Davidson Honors

From Left: Sean Li, Andrei Mandelstam, Espen Slettnes, Kenta Suzuki

PRIMES student Sean Li won the $10,000 Davidson Fellowship for his project "On Group-Theoretic Extensions of Penney's Game," mentored by Tanya Khovanova, who he says "provided high-level insight and gave myriads of advice on exposition." Sean is attending MIT as a prospective math major.

Honorable mentions went to PRIMES students Espen Slettnes and Kenta Suzuki (now an MIT student). RSI student Andrei Mandelstam also received an honorable mention. Of the six math projects receiving Davidson honors this year, four were completed in our PRIMES or RSI programs.

Congratulations and thanks to Pavel Etingof, Slava Gerovitch, David Jerison, Tanya Khovanova, and Ankur Moitra for running PRIMES and RSI, and to the PRIMES/RSI mentors: our PhDs Jesse Geneson and Daniil Kalinov, and Prof. Michael Zieve of the University of Michigan!

Tristan Collins Receives 2021 Aisenstadt Prize

The International Scientific Advisory Committee of the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques, University of Montreal, recently announced that Tristan Collins is the recipient of the 2021 André Aisenstadt Prize in Mathematics.

This prize, awarded to a young outstanding Canadian mathematician, will also be given to Giulio Tiozzo, who is at the University of Toronto.

Tristan will virtually present "Exploring string vacua through geometric transitions" at a CRM colloquium on Nov. 19, 2021.

Congratulations Tristan!

Instructor Yilin Wang and Hong Wang PhD ’19 Awarded 2022 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize in Mathematics

From Left: Yilin Wang, Hong Wang

CLE Moore Instructor Yilin Wang and Hong Wang PhD ’19, a UCLA assistant professor of mathematics, are recipients of the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, awarded to outstanding early-career women in mathematics by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.

Yilin is cited "for innovative and far-reaching work on the Loewner energy of planar curves" according to the award citation, and Hong "for advances on the restriction conjecture, the local smoothing conjecture, and related problems."

"Once again, it is uplifting to see women in mathematics receiving a major prize for their outstanding research," says Department of Mathematics Head Michel Goemans, the RSA Professor of Mathematics. "We are proud of Yilin's achievements in probability and Hong’s contributions to Fourier analysis."

Congratulations Yilin and Hong!

Read more in the MIT News.

SPUR Teams Share Rogers Prize

Top From Left: Feng Gui, Dain Kim, Daishi Kiyohara
Bottom From Left: Anqi Li, Jonathan Tidor

SPUR/SPUR+ (Summer Program in Undergraduate Research) wrapped up this year’s program with two teams sharing the 2021 Hartley Rogers Jr. Family Prize for the best SPUR paper.

Students Dain Kim and Anqi Li’s paper "Cubic Goldreich-Levin," suggested by their mentor and SPUR ’16 and PRIMES ’13 alum Jonathan Tidor, “makes a substantial contribution to a challenging area of algorithms and combinatorics,” stated the judges.

Daishi Kiyohara’s project, "A new approach to the upper estimate of lattice points on a curve via 𝓁2 decoupling," was suggested by Larry Guth and mentored by Feng Gui. “This project introduces exciting new techniques and ideas from Fourier decoupling theory to count lattice points on curves satisfying certain algebraic non-degeneracy conditions,” said the judges.

Twelve MIT undergraduates presented six individual and three joint research projects at the Aug. 6, 2021 online SPUR Conference to judges Tristan Collins, Davesh Maulik, and Michael Sipser.

This summer’s Aug. 5 RSI (Research Science Institute) Symposium also saw 11 outstanding high school students from the U.S., Bulgaria, China, Hong Kong, and Kazakhstan present online their math research projects, mentored by graduate students from our department.

The SPUR/SPUR+ and RSI math programs were run by faculty advisors David Jerison and Ankur Moitra, program director Slava Gerovitch, and RSI head mentor Tanya Khovanova.