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Several members of the community were recognized and awarded for their contributions at the department’s Spring social.

Yiqi Huang and Zhiyang He were awarded the Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Prize, which is presented to a graduate student for an outstanding paper accepted for publication in a major journal. Huang’s paper “Volume Estimates for Singular Sets and Critical Sets of Elliptic Equations with Holder Coefficients”, and He’s paper “Extractors: QLDPC Architectures for Efficient Pauli-Based Computation”, were recognized in this award.

The recipient of the David J. Benney Prize, presented to a graduate student who demonstrates excellence in applied mathematics, is Joel Been. This award honors David Benney, an applied math professor who died in 2015. Benney chaired the Applied Mathematics Committee from 1983-1985, and served as Department Head for two terms, 1989-1999.

The Charles and Holly Housman Award for Excellence in Teaching is presented to a graduate student for skill and dedication in undergraduate teaching, and was awarded to Josh Messing and Mary Stelow. The Housman Award, a Department Teaching and Learning Award for skill and dedication to teaching, went to C.L.E. Moore instructor Karol Bacik.

The Baddoo Community Builder Award, named in honor of the late department instructor Peter Baddoo, recognizes significant contributions to building and strengthening the MIT Math Community. This year, Kyle McKee and Robin Zhang, were presented with the award.

Congratulations Yiqi, Zhiyang, Joel, Josh, Mary, Karol, Kyle, and Robin!

Gohar Khan, an MIT alum '21 and YouTuber with 7.5M subscribers, has prepared a video at MIT on the Putnam exam, our Putnam seminar (coached this year by Henry Cohn), and the numerous MIT students joyfully participating in the competition.

Watch Gohar's video on YouTube.

Thank you, Gohar Khan, Natalie Kwok, Henry Cohn, Katie, Zsófi, Tiger, Mira, Pitchayut, and all the MIT participants!

Jeremy Hahn shares one of the 2026 Clay Research Awards with Robert Burklund, Ishan Levy and Tomer Schlank for their disproof of Ravenel's Telescope conjecture. Pretty much an MIT quartet, with two BS, two PhD, one Visiting Professor, and one tenured associate professor from MIT among them!

The other two 2026 Clay Research Awards have been awarded to Yu Deng (BS, MIT) and Zaher Hani (long-time derivation of Boltzmann equation from hard sphere dynamics), and to Tuomas Orponen, Pablo Shmerkin, Hong Wang (PhD, MIT), and Joshua Zahl (proofs of Furstenberg set conjecture in 2D and the Kakeya conjecture in 3D).

Read more about Jeremy's award at the Clay Mathematics Institute.

Congratulations to Jeremy and all the other recipients!

Ankur Moitra has been awarded the 2026 W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE Computer Society.

The McDowell Award is given yearly to individuals for outstanding recent theoretical, design, educational, practical, or other similar innovative contribution that falls within the scope of IEEE Computer Society interest. His citation reads “For groundbreaking contributions to high-dimensional learning —spanning mixture models, robust statistics, and quantum systems.”

Read more about Ankur’s award at the IEEE Computer Society.

Congratulations, Ankur!