Larry Guth to Receive the Maryam Mirzakhani Prize of the National Academy of Sciences

Larry Guth will receive the newly named Maryam Mirzakhani Prize in Mathematics (formerly the NAS Award in Mathematics) at the Academy's 157th annual meeting in April 2020.

He is recognized “for developing surprising, original, and deep connections between geometry, analysis, topology, and combinatorics, which have led to the solution of, or major advances on, many outstanding problems in these fields.” The Mirzakhani prize honors exceptional contributions to the mathematical sciences by a mid-career mathematician.

Congratulations Larry!

Alexei Borodin Receives the Fermat Prize

Alexei Borodin has been awarded the 2019 Fermat Prize for the invention of integrable probability theory, a new area at the interface of representation theory, combinatorics, and statistical physics.

The prize also went to Maryna Viazovska, professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

The Fermat Prize is awarded every two years by the Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse to one or several mathematicians under the age of 45, for contributions to an area where Pierre de Fermat's work was particularly influential: statements of variational principles; foundations of probability and analytical geometry; and number theory.

Congratulations Alexei!

Larry Guth Receives Bôcher Memorial Prize

The American Mathematical Society has chosen Larry Guth to receive the 2020 Bôcher Memorial Prize.

Larry received the prize for his “deep and influential development of algebraic and topological methods for partitioning the Euclidean space and multi-scale organization of data, and his powerful applications of these tools in harmonic analysis, incidence geometry, analytic number theory, and partial differential equations.” Larry wrote about this technique in his book “Polynomial Methods in Combinatorics.”

“Larry is being recognized for two outstanding papers that use polynomial partitioning, a powerful technique first introduced by Larry together with Nets Katz for their solution of the Erdos distinct distance problem in incidence geometry,” said Department Head Michel Goemans.

The other 2020 Bôcher Prize recipients are Camillo De Lellis and Laure Saint-Raymond, and previous recipients from MIT include Richard Melrose and Isadore Singer.

Congratulations, Larry!

Morgan Prize Honorable Mention Given to Four Students, Formerly or Presently Connected to the Mathematics Department

Left: Murilo Corato Zanarella, Right: Mehtaab Sawhney, David Stoner, and Ashwin Sah

MIT math graduate student Murilo Corato Zanarella received the 2020 Frank and Brennie Morgan Honorable Mention Prize for his undergraduate research at Princeton University. Three students, Mehtaab Sawhney '20, Ashwin Sah '20, and RSI alum David Stoner (graduate of Harvard, and now a graduate student at Stanford) were jointly awarded for their collection of papers on a wide range of topics in discrete mathematics. The Morgan Prizes were presented in January at the 2020 Joint Mathematics Meeting.

Congratulations, everyone!