Michel Goemans Awarded Dantzig Prize

Michel Goemans received the George B. Dantzig Prize, recognizing Michel’s "outstanding contributions to the field of combinatorial optimization; most notably, the initiation of new research directions, introduction of novel and deep techniques, and ingenious use of sampling, rounding, and geometric ideas to significantly advance several fields, including the pioneering use of semi-definite programming for the design of approximation algorithms."

The George B. Dantzig Prize is awarded every three years by the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

Michel was also named RSA Professor of Mathematics. The RSA public key encryption technology was invented at MIT by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, who were on the faculty in Mathematics (for Len and Adi) and in EECS (for Ron).

Congratulations Michel!

Allen Liu Awarded Hertz Fellowship

Mathematics alumnus Allen Liu ’20, now a first-year graduate student at EECS, was among 12 doctoral candidates to receive the prestigious Hertz Fellowship.

Allen is developing algorithms with provable guarantees for a variety of fundamental learning problems in preference learning, robust statistics, and other areas. Under Ankur Moitra, Liu developed an efficient algorithm that provably learns the parameters of a mixture of Gaussians from samples, even amid adversarial noise.

Congratulations Allen!

Ankur Moitra Appointed Norbert Wiener Professor

Ankur Moitra has been promoted to full professor, and now holds the Norbert Wiener Professorship in Mathematics. Norbert Wiener, the father of cynernetics, was on the faculty in the Department from 1926 until his retirement in 1960 as Institute Professor Emeritus.

Ankur has also started in his new role as Director of the MIT Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC).

Congratulations Ankur!

Philippe Rigollet Named Fellow of IMS

Philippe Rigollet was named a fellow of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics. He was recognized for "outstanding contributions to the analysis of statistical versus computational trade-offs, to the theory of aggregation, and to statistical optimal transport."

Congratulations Philippe!