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The provost has selected three senior faculty members to the following five-year named professorships as of July 1, 2024: Alexei Borodin, Barton L. Weller (1940) Professorship; Davesh Maulik, Norman Levinson Professorship; and Philippe Rigollet, Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professorship.

Assistant Professor Dor Minzer has been appointed to the Cecil and Ida B. Green Career Development Professorship, for a three-year term.

These named professorships are funded from endowed gifts to the Institute or the Department, and constitute a significant honor for their holders.

Congratulations Alexei, Davesh, Philippe and Dor!

The Department welcomes three assistant professors as of July 1: Shaoyun Bai, Jacopo Borga, and Christoph Kehle.

Shaoyun specializes in symplectic topology and is interested in problems interacting with neighboring fields. After receiving his PhD from Princeton University under the supervision of John Pardon, Shaoyun held short-term visiting positions at MSRI (now SLMath) and the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics. Most recently he was the Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University.

Previously the Szegö Assistant Professor at Stanford, Jacopo is interested in probability theory and its connections to combinatorics and mathematical physics. Jacopo received his PhD in Mathematics from the Institut für Mathematik of the Universität Zürich, under the supervision of Valentin Feŕay and Mathilde Bouvel. In 2022, he received the Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award, and in 2023, the Bruno de Finetti Award.

Christoph is interested in analysis, partial differential equations, and general relativity, with recent research focused on the formation and dynamics of black holes. After receiving his PhD in 2020 from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Mihalis Dafermos, Christoph was a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and a junior fellow at ETH Zurich’s Institute for Theoretical Studies.

Please welcome Christoph, Jacopo, and Shaoyun!

Former instructor Zilin Jiang, Jonathan Tidor '17 PhD '22, graduate student Yuan Yao, Shengtong Zhang ’22, and Professor Yufei Zhao '10, PhD '15 received the 2024 Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize from the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Optimization Society. They were recognized for their paper "Equiangular lines with a fixed angle," published in 2021 by Annals of Mathematics.

The Fulkerson Prize is awarded every three years for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics.

Congratulations, Jonathan, Shengtong, Yuan, Yufei, and Zilin!

SPUR/SPUR+ (Summer Program in Undergraduate Research) culminated with two teams sharing the 2024 Hartley Rogers Jr. Family Prize for the best SPUR paper.

MIT undergraduates presented individual and joint research projects at the summer 2024 SPUR Conference to judges Semyon Dyatlov, Julee Kim, and Michael Sipser.

Senior Luis Modes and junior Benjamin Li’s paper “Isomorphism between Hall algebra and shuffle algebra” was mentored by Haoshuo Fu and suggested by Zhiwei Yun.

Sophomore Edward Yu and junior Alek Westover’s paper “The Diamond test: A novel affinity tester for boolean functions,” was mentored by Kai Zhe Zeng, and suggested by Dor Minzer.

This summer’s RSI (Research Science Institute) Symposium also saw 10 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 lead faculty advisor David Jerison, faculty advisor Jonathan Bloom, and program coordinator André Lee Dixon.

A big thank you to all involved, and congratulations to Alek, Benjamin, Edward, and Luis, and mentors Haoshuo and Kai Zhe.

Professor Scott Sheffield received the 2024 Henri Poincaré prize at the International Congress on Mathematical Physics, which is held every three years.

Scott, who was among four who received this year’s prize, gave an overview of random surfaces theory at the event. The prize was created in 1997 to “recognize outstanding contributions in mathematical physics, and contributions which lay the groundwork for novel developments in this broad field.” Professor Alexei Borodin received this award in 2015.

Congratulations, Scott!