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It is with a sense of deep sorrow that we write to inform you of an unexpected and tragic loss in the Math community. On Wednesday afternoon, Feb 15, our department was notified of the sudden passing of Peter Baddoo, at the age of 29, by cardiac arrest while playing basketball on campus.

Peter studied mathematics as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, then completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He was an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow at Imperial College prior to joining our department as an Instructor in January 2021.

Peter was a brilliant applied mathematician with broad research interests and activities that spanned complex function theory, fluid dynamics, and machine learning and data-driven methods. He was an exemplary teacher and colleague who gave generously of his time in assisting colleagues, graduate students and undergraduates alike. He was a catalyst in organizing social events for our postdoctoral fellows and instructors, for which he received a Math Community Service Award.

Peter was a lively, joyful young man, a gentle soul with a kind spirit and a ready smile. His interests extended well beyond mathematics, and included music (saxophone) and sport (lacrosse, squash and basketball). He dearly loved his family and friends, and was a devoted member of the Park Street Church. His last years were blessed by the love of his life who he was to marry this spring. Peter will be sorely missed by all who knew him.

For the third time in the history of the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, and for the third year in a row, all five of the top spots in the contest, known as Putnam Fellows, came from a single school — MIT.

Putnam Fellows are first years Papon Lapate and Luke Robitaille, sophomore Brian Liu, junior Mingyang Deng, and senior Daniel Zhu. Daniel has placed as a Fellow every year he has competed in the exam.

The 2022 Putnam team, listed in alphabetical order, are Deng, Robitaille, and Zhu. Teams are based on the three top scorers from each institution. This is the MIT team's seventh first-place win in the past nine competitions.

Junior Binwei Yan, who finished in the top 15, received the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize, which includes a $1,000 award. She is the sixth MIT student to receive this honor since the award began in 1992.

MIT students also dominated the rest of the scoreboard: 9 of the next 11 (each awarded $1,000), 7 of the next 9 (each awarded $250), and 49 of the 75 honorable mention rankings. In total, 70 out of the top 100 test-takers overall were MIT students.

Congratulations to everyone who participated in this year's exam!

A full list of the winners can be found on the Putnam website.

Read more in the MIT News.

Jeremy Hahn '13 PD'18, who recently joined our faculty in 2021, was awarded the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship.

He is the Rockwell International Career Development Assistant Professor of Mathematics. Jeremy's research is in in algebraic topology and homotopy theory. With collaborators, he has done work in equivariant chromatic homotopy theory, the classification of high-dimensional manifolds, and the redshift conjectures in algebraic K-theory. He hopes to better understand the behavior of new invariants of ring spectra, such as syntomic and prismatic cohomology.

He is among nine new MIT Sloan Fellows this year. Including this year's recipients, a total of 327 MIT faculty have received Sloan Research Fellowships since they began in 1955. Altogether, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation selected 126 U.S. and Canadian early-career scholars across seven fields for the two-year, $75,000 fellowship to further their research program.

Read more in the MIT News.

Congratulations everyone!