First-year PhD Students Travis Dillon and Alex Cohen Receive Morgan Prize Honors

Travis Dillon will receive the 2022 AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student. A graduate of Lawrence University, he is recognized for his work in number theory, combinatorics, discrete geometry, and symbolic dynamics.

In addition, Alex Cohen will receive the 2022 Frank and Brennie Morgan Honorable Mention Prize for his undergraduate work at Yale, where he solved a number of long-standing open problems in areas from combinatorics to analysis and partial differential equations.

They will both be awarded at January’s Joint Math Meeting Seattle.

Congratulations Travis and Alex!

Semyon Dyatlov Awarded Mikhail Gordin Prize

Semyon Dyatlov will receive the inaugural 2022 Mikhail Gordin Prize at the 2022 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle.

The Mikhail Gordin prize, offered jointly by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the European Mathematical Society (EMS), is awarded to a mathematician working in probability or dynamical systems, with preference given to early career mathematicians from or professionally connected to an Eastern European country.

Semyon is recognized for his work on quantum chaos, scattering theory and, in particular, differentiable dynamical systems.

Congratulations Semyon!

Lisa Sauermann Awarded European Prize in Combinatorics

Lisa Sauermann, who recently joined our department as assistant professor, has been selected as one of the recipients of the 2021 European Prize in Combinatorics, which was awarded at Eurocomb in September. The prize is for research in combinatorics and is awarded every two years.

She was cited for her "profound contribution to combinatorics, particularly for results on the growth rate of algebraically defined classes, for the solution of an old Erdös, Faudree, Rousseau, and Schelp and for the solution of edge-statistics conjecture."

Congratulations Lisa!

Carina Hong and Alexandra Hoey Receive 2022 Alice T. Schafer Honors

The Association for Women in Mathematics announced that Letong "Carina" Hong, a math and physics double major, won the 2022 Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize for excellence in mathematics by an undergraduate woman. In addition, Mathematics major Alexandra Hoey was awarded honorable mention.

Carina participated in REUs at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and the University of Virginia that led to a number of papers, including three accepted for publication. She also participated in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics and the IAS Women and Mathematics program. Carina was recently selected for a Rhodes Scholarship. Carina also serves as President of MIT's Undergraduate Mathematics Association (UMA).

Alexandra participated in the MIT Summer Program in Undergraduate Research and spent two summers at the University of Virginia REU, focusing on arithmetic statistics. Her work has led to two papers – one of which will appear in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. She has also served as a PRIMES Circle mentor.

The Schafer Prize Winners will be presented at the January 2022 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle.

Congratulations Carina and Alexandra!