MIT Dominates Putnam Competition

MIT students set records at the 2019 Putnam Competion: (left to right) Shentong Zhang, Yuan Yao, Kevin Sun, Daniel Zhu, Qi Qi and Dain Kim. Not pictured: Ashwin Sah.

For the first time in Putnam history, in the 80th annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, all of the top scorers, designated Putnam Fellows, were from one institution, MIT! In alphabetical order, the Fellows are Ashwin Sah, Kevin Sun Yuan Yao, Shentong Zhang, and Daniel Zhu.

MIT also took 9 of the next 11 top spots, 8 of the following 12, and 33 of the 80 Honorable Mentions. Included among these participants were top female participants Dain Kim and Qi Qi. Qi was one of the three winners of the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize.

Read more at MIT News

Congratulations, everyone!

Peter Shor Receives the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, and Is Elected to National Academy of Engineering

Peter Shor, with Charles H. Bennett (IBM Research) and Gilles Brassard (University of Montreal), received The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, in the category of Basic Sciences, "for their fundamental role in the development of quantum computation and cryptology."

Peter was also recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his pioneering contributions to quantum computation.

Congratulations Peter!

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!