SPUR Teams Share 2023 Rogers Prize
SPUR/SPUR+ (Summer Program in Undergraduate Research) culminated with two teams sharing the 2023 Hartley Rogers Jr. Family Prize for the best SPUR paper.
MIT undergraduates presented individual and joint research projects at the summer 2023 SPUR Conference to judges Davesh Maulik, John Urschel, and David Vogan.
The judges said that seniors Saba Lepsveridze and Yihang Sun’s paper “Size of the Largest Sum-Free Set in [n]^3,” as mentored by Mehtaab Sawhney, impressed them with a “solution to a longstanding question in additive combinatorics” and congratulated them “for a very lucid presentation.”
From left, David Jerison, Daniel Santiago, Isaac Lopez, and Michael Law
Senior Daniel Santiago and junior Isaac Lopez’s paper “Positive Mass Theorems for Asymptotically Euclidean Smooth Metric Measure Spaces,” as mentored by Michael Law, studied a new iteration of a classical problem in general relativity and “found a very elegant solution to it, which improved on earlier work of (Julius) Baldauf and (Tristan) Ozuch,” said the judges.
This summer’s RSI (Research Science Institute) Symposium also saw 12 exceptional high school students from around the world present their math research projects, as mentored by our graduate students and led by head mentor Tanya Khovanova.
The SPUR/SPUR+ and RSI math programs are run by faculty advisor David Jerison and program coordinator André Lee Dixon.
Congratulations, Daniel, Isaac, Saba, and Yihang!