News Archive

Welcome Jeanne, Alex, Jorge and Naomi!

A big thank you to all involved, and congratulations to Nikola, Sylvia and Tony (Guanjie), and mentors Ayan, Ashu, and Alexander!

A big thank you to all involved, and congratulations to Sam and Edward, and mentors Saba and Yonghwan!

Congratulations to all!

Congratulations to all!

Congratulations Yiqi, Zhiyang, Joel, Josh, Mary, Karol, Kyle, and Robin!

Gohar Khan, an MIT alum '21 and YouTuber with 7.5M subscribers, has prepared a video at MIT on the Putnam exam, our Putnam seminar (coached this year by Henry Cohn), and the numerous MIT students joyfully participating in the competition.

Watch Gohar's video on YouTube.

Thank you, Gohar Khan, Natalie Kwok, Henry Cohn, Katie, Zsófi, Tiger, Mira, Pitchayut, and all the MIT participants!

Congratulations, Roman and Dor!

Jeremy Hahn shares one of the 2026 Clay Research Awards with Robert Burklund, Ishan Levy and Tomer Schlank for their disproof of Ravenel's Telescope conjecture. Pretty much an MIT quartet, with two BS, two PhD, one Visiting Professor, and one tenured associate professor from MIT among them!

The other two 2026 Clay Research Awards have been awarded to Yu Deng (BS, MIT) and Zaher Hani (long-time derivation of Boltzmann equation from hard sphere dynamics), and to Tuomas Orponen, Pablo Shmerkin, Hong Wang (PhD, MIT), and Joshua Zahl (proofs of Furstenberg set conjecture in 2D and the Kakeya conjecture in 3D).

Read more about Jeremy's award at the Clay Mathematics Institute.

Congratulations to Jeremy and all the other recipients!

Harvey Philip Greenspan, Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at MIT, passed away on March 20, 2026 at the age of 93. Harvey served on the MIT faculty in our department for 42 years until his retirement in 2002, and was a preeminent applied mathematician. He is survived by his wife Miriam, their two daughters Elizabeth Greenspan and Judith Greenspan, their sons-in-law Jeffrey Hurwit and Thomas Berman, four grandchildren, other family members and several old friends.

Please read more about Harvey's life and work here.

Ankur Moitra has been awarded the 2026 W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE Computer Society.

The McDowell Award is given yearly to individuals for outstanding recent theoretical, design, educational, practical, or other similar innovative contribution that falls within the scope of IEEE Computer Society interest. His citation reads “For groundbreaking contributions to high-dimensional learning —spanning mixture models, robust statistics, and quantum systems.”

Read more about Ankur’s award at the IEEE Computer Society.

Congratulations, Ankur!

Adityanarayanan “Adit” Radhakrishnan has been awarded the Edmund F. Kelly Research Award.

Periodically, our department gives this award to one or several junior faculty members "in recognition of work that applies mathematical methods in a new area or that offers a fundamentally new perspective on a classical problem."

This award was established in honor of former Liberty Mutual CEO and President Edmund "Ted" Kelly, who received his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Sigurdur Helgason in 1970.

Congratulations, Adit!

Gigliola Staffilani has been named as the 2027 AWM-AMS Emmy Noether Lecturer. The Noether Lecture will be delivered at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January 2027.

The Emmy Noether Lectures were launched by the AWM in 1980 to "honor women who have made fundamental and sustained contributions to the mathematical sciences”.

Read more about the announcement at AWM.

Congratulations, Gigliola!

Jacopo Borga has been named as a 2026 Sloan Research Fellow by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The Sloan Research Fellows are selected from early-career scholars, and honors "exceptional researchers at U.S. and Canadian educational institutions, whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders”.

Read more about Jacopo's award at MIT News.

Congratulazioni, Jacopo!

The Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics has been awarded to Tobias Holck Colding “for profound contributions to the theory of minimal surfaces and geometric flows”.

The Rolf Schock Prizes are awarded every two years and the selection of laureates is done in collaboration between three Swedish academies: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. This year’s Schock Prizes reward innovative jazz and research on geometric flows.

Read more about Toby's award at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Congratulations, Toby!

The 2026-2027 Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for the Advancement of Women Scholars has been awarded to Nike Sun.

The Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship is "specially designed for the mathematics community with the goal of advancing the participation and success of women in mathematics”.

Read more about Nike's award at the American Mathematical Society.

Congratulations, Nike!

The AMS Chevalley Prize will be awarded to Zhiwei Yun (and shared with Tasho Kaletha from U. of Bonn) at the Joint Math Meeting in 2026. Zhiwei Yun is being recognized for his influential contributions to geometric representation theory and its applications to number theory.

The Chevalley Prize in Lie Theory is given biennially for notable work in Lie theory published during the preceding six years. The prize was established in 2014 by George Lusztig to honor Claude Chevalley (1909-1984), a founding member of the Bourbaki group.

Read more about the award at the American Mathematical Society.

Congratulations, Zhiwei!

Four members of the MIT Math community were celebrated as the recipients of the 2026 named PRIMES mentorships at our Winter Social on Dec 3.

Three received the Lusztig Mentorship, which is supported by the generosity of George Lusztig through his 2014 Shaw Prize:

Ryan Maguire, a Digital Learning Postdoctoral Associate and Instructor. In 2025, he mentored seven students working on three research groups on Saturn's Rings, Cassini Radio Science, and Jones Polynomial.

Son Nguyen, a graduate student whose main research interest is algebraic combinatorics, specifically Schur positivity and Schubert calculus. He has mentored for UROP, PRIMES, and GUMMI.

Frank Wang, a graduate student whose research interests lie in representation theory, specifically in quantum groups and rational Cherednik algebras. He is a co-organizer of the PuMaGraSS seminar, and has been a mentor for PRIMES, RSI, and GUMMI.

The 2026 Bershadsky Mentor Award, kindly supported by Michael and Victoria Bershadsky, was awarded to Alain Kangabire. Alain is a PhD student, and his research interests are in micro local analysis and dynamical systems. He mentored for various programs including PRIMES, UROP, and RSI. In 2025, he supervised a PRIMES reading group of three students, studying curvature on Riemannian manifolds.

Read more about the mentorship awards on our website.

Congratulations, Ryan, Son, Frank and Alain! Thank you, as well, to George Lusztig, and Michael and Victoria Bershadsky!

Semyon Dyatlov has been awarded another major prize, this time the 2026 AMS Bôcher Memorial Prize (along with Mihalis Dafermos and Jonathan Luk). The Bôcher prize was established more than 100 years ago, and is given every 3 years for outstanding work in analysis. Dyatlov is being recognized for his pioneering work connecting the dynamics of geodesic flows and the behavior of waves (including Laplace eigenfunctions and solutions to the wave equation); this work is developed in a series of 4 papers (co-authored with subsets of Joshua Zahl, Jean Bourgain and Long Jin).

Previous Bôcher prize recipients include several MIT analysts over the last century: Larry Guth (2020), Richard Melrose (1984), Is Singer (1969), Norman Levinson (1953), and Norbert Wiener (1933).

Read more at the American Mathematical Society.

Congratulations, Semyon!

The 2026 Joseph L. Doob Prize will be awarded to Semyon Dyatlov and Maciej Zworski (UC Berkeley) for their 2019 AMS book, Mathematical Theory of Scattering Resonances. The book has "established itself as the key text on contemporary spectral and scattering theory, magisterially unifying decades of advances into a cohesive, rigorous framework”.

Read more about the award at the American Mathematical Society.

Congratulations, Semyon!

Edgar Costa has been awarded the 2025 MIT Prize for Open Data from the MIT School of Science and MIT Libraries for his involvement in LMFDB, the L-Functions and modular forms database. The prize is selected from nominees representing 30 different departments, labs, centers and institutes across MIT.

Read more at MIT Libraries.

Congratulations, Edgar!

Wei Zhang, alongside his team members from AIM SQuaRE "geometry of Shimura varieties and arithmetic application to L-functions" are recipients of the 2025 Alexanderson Award by the American Institute of Mathematics. The team is recognized for two papers, published in Annals in 2021 and Inventiones in 2022. The award will be given at the Joint Mathematics Meetings Awards Celebration in January 2026.

Read more about their work and the award at the American Institute of Mathematics.

Congratulations, Wei!

Laurent Demanet has been named co-director of MIT’s Center for Computational Science and Engineering, effective September 1. He will co-lead the center’s mission to integrate computational methods across disciplines.

Read more in the MIT News.

Congratulations, Laurent!

This summer’s RSI (Research Science Institute) Symposium featured 11 exceptional high school students from around the world presenting their math research projects, as mentored by five graduate students and three senior undergrads, faculty advisors Roman Bezrukavnikov and Jonathan Bloom, and head mentor Tanya Khovanova.

Judy Li (Mentor: Frank Wang) and Dimana Pramatarova (mentor: Ryota Inagaki) each received a distinguished presentation award. Susie Lu (mentor: Genaro Laymuns under the guidance of Prof. John Urschel) received a distinguished paper award.

A big thank you to all involved, and congratulations to Dimana, Judy, and Susie, and mentors Frank, Genaro, and Ryota!

A big thank you to all involved, and congratulations to Henrick, Joseph, and Papon and mentors Ivan and Michael!

Several members of the MIT Math community received 2025 Frontiers of Science awards for top research papers at July's International Congress for Basic Science (ICBS) in Beijing, China.

This year's recipients include:

• Davesh Maulik for two papers: "The P=W Conjecture for GL_n," a joint paper with Junliang Shen, Annals of Mathematics, 2024; and "Gopakumar-Vafa Invariants via Vanishing Cycles" with Yukinobu Toda, Inventiones Mathematicae, 2018.
• Former instructor Zilin Jiang, Jonathan Tidor PhD '22, graduate student Yuan Yao '21, Shengtong Zhang '22, and Yufei Zhao, "Equiangular Lines with a Fixed Angle," Annals of Mathematics, 2021.
• Zhiwei Yun for "Functions on the Commuting Stack via Langlands Duality" with Penghui Li and David Nadler, in Annals of Mathematics, 2024.
• Former faculty member Tristan Collins for two papers: "Moment maps, nonlinear PDE and stability in mirror symmetry" with Shing-Tung Yau in Annals of Partial Differential Equations, 2021, and "Sasaki-Einstein metrics and K-stability" with Gábor Székelyhidi in Geometry and Topology, 2019.

Congratulations to all the recipients!

Five MIT math faculty members and one from EECS have been invited to give lectures at the upcoming International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia from July 23 to 30, 2026.

Invited speakers from MIT at ICM 2026 are Jeremy Hahn in the Topology section, Dor Minzer in the Mathematics of Computer Science section, Philippe Rigollet and Caroline Uhler (EECS) in the Statistics and Machine Learning section, and Gigliola Staffilani and Nike Sun in the Mathematical Physics section.

Meeting every four years, ICM is the largest and most recognized meeting for the mathematical community, showcasing the most important, recent advances across all subfields of mathematics. Being invited at ICM is a tremendous honor.

Four faculty members have been selected to hold named professorships as of July 1, 2025: Roman Bezrukavnikov holds a Norbert Wiener Professorship; Pavel Etingof, the David W. Skinner Professorship; Tristan Ozuch-Meersseman, the Rockwell International Career Development Assistant Professorship; and John Urschel, the Class of 1956 Career Development Assistant Professorship.

These named professorships are funded from endowed gifts to the Institute or the Department, and constitute a significant honor for their holders. Career Development Professorships are for three years, while Full Professorships are for an initial term of 5 years and renewable.

Congratulations, John, Pavel, Roman, and Tristan!

Congratulations to Dor and Jeremy!

On July 1, the Department welcomed to our faculty Leighton Family Professor of Mathematics Shafi Goldwasser, Professor Henry Cohn ‘95, and Assistant Professor Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan ’16, MNG ’17, PhD ’23.

Shafi is an Israeli-American computer scientist specializing in cryptography, number theory, and complexity theory. She received a BS in applied mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979, and her MS and PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley in 1984, with advisor Manuel Blum. She joined MIT in 1983 as a member of CSAIL’s Theory of Computation group, and in 1997 became the first holder of the RSA Professorship. She also joined the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1993 where she is now an emeritus professor. She joined UC Berkeley in 2013, where she served as the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing until 2024, and is currently a co-director of the Resilience research pod. In 2016, she cofounded Duality Technologies, which offers secure data analytics using advanced cryptographic techniques. She is also a scientific advisor for several technology startups in the security areas. Among her recognitions is the 2012 Turing Award for "revolutionizing the science of cryptography."

Henry is a 1995 MIT math alum who received his PhD from Harvard in 2000 with advisor Noam Elkies. He joined the theory group at Microsoft Research as a postdoc before transitioning to a long-term position in the group, later managed the cryptography group, and was a senior principal researcher and founding member of Microsoft Research New England. He joined MIT Math as adjunct professor in 2010. Cohn’s research is in discrete mathematics, with a particular interest in the intersection of pure and applied mathematics: pure mathematics inspired by applications, and opportunities to apply mathematics in unexpected ways. Cohn received the 2018 Levi L. Conant Prize for his article “A Conceptual Breakthrough in Sphere Packing," Notices of the AMS, February 2017.

Adit received his SB in Math and EECS, and completed his M.Eng and his PhD with EECS, as advised by Caroline Uhler. He previously was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the George F. Carrier Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. His research focuses on advancing theoretical foundations of machine learning and developing new methods for tackling biomedical problems. He is also joining the Broad Institute as an associate member, where he is working to assemble a comprehensive catalog of cellular programs and advance our understanding of cellular biology and identify mechanisms of disease. He also goes by the name Adit Radha.

Welcome, Shafi, Henry, and Adit!

Alan Edelman received the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Community on Parallel Processing (TCPP) Award for Excellence in Parallel and Distributed Computing Education, at the International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (IPDPS), which was held in Milan this month.

He was recognized “for innovative programming language design for HPC (high-performance computing) with Julia used in influential courses impacting academia and industry.”

This award recognizes an individual (or a group of individuals) in the broader community who have made major professional service contributions to the parallel, distributed, and high-performance computing community.

The IEEE Technical Community on Parallel Processing (TCPP) is a technical community within the IEEE Computer Society, acting as an international forum to promote parallel processing research and education. The community solicits nominations for an award on Excellence in Parallel and Distributed Computing Education.

Congratulations, Alan!

The Hertz Foundation announced that it has awarded fellowships to four students with MIT Math ties:

Matthew Caren ’25 studied math, electrical engineering and computer science, and music at MIT. He researches computational models of how people use their voices to communicate sound at CSAIL, and interpretable real-time machine listening systems at the MIT Music Technology Lab.

Arav Karighattam is a 2024 Harvard alum who is coming to MIT to pursue a doctorate in mathematics. Karighattam is fascinated by algebraic number theory and arithmetic geometry and seeks to understand the mysteries underlying the structure of solutions to Diophantine equations.

Benjamin Lou ’25 received his MIT SB in mathematics and physics, and will pursue his doctorate at MIT to to work on unifying quantum mechanics and gravity, with an eye toward uncovering experimentally testable predictions. One of his research projects applies symplectic techniques to understand the nature of precision measurements using quantum states of light.

Albert Qin ‘24 majored in mathematics and physics at MIT, and is also interested in biology, researching single-molecule approaches to study transcription factor diffusion in living cells and studying the cell circuits that control animal development. Qin is currently pursuing a PhD at Princeton University, addressing questions about the behavior of neural networks.

They are among eight total recipients at MIT, and a total of 19 selected from across the United States. The prestigious award provides each recipient with five years of doctoral-level research funding (up to a total of $250,000).

Read more at MIT News.

Congratulations!

The 2025 Charles and Holly Housman Award for Excellence in Teaching was presented to three MIT Math community members for their skills and dedication in undergraduate teaching.

Graduate student Keita Allen was recognized for his “true passion for education” and for helping other students, including as a UROP mentor.

Housman awards for instructors were given to Jonathan Bloom, for his ability to teach complex math concepts in a dynamic and engaging way, and to Miguel Moreira, for his supportive teaching style, including as a UROP mentor.

Congratulations, Jonathan, Keita, and Miguel!

The 2025 Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Prize, for a research paper accepted for publication in a major journal, has been awarded to graduate students Ilya Dumanski for his paper “A Geometric Approach to Feigin-Loktev Fusion Product and Cluster Relations in Coherent Satake Category,” International Mathematics Research Notices, Volume 2024, Issue 22, November 2024, and to Kyle McKee for his paper “Magnetohydrodynamic flow control in Hele-Shaw cells,” Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Cambridge University Press, Sept. 13, 2024.

Kyle is also the recipient of the David J. Benney Prize, which recognizes excellence in applied mathematics, with preference given to students in physical applied math, computational science, numerical analysis, computational biology, or theoretical physics. He was recognized for a mathematical style “which is directed toward elucidating the physics of complex continuum systems via mathematical modeling.”

This award honors David Benney, an applied math professor who died in 2015. Benney chaired the Applied Mathematics Committee from 1983-1985, and served as Department Head for two terms, 1989-1999.

Congratulations, Ilya and Kyle!

Three undergraduates and a graduate student received the 2025 Peter Baddoo Community Building Award, for individuals who have made significant contributions to building and strengthening our MIT Math community.

Matija Delic, Pitchayut (Mark) Saengrungkongka, and George Shaker were recognized for their enthusiasm and outreach.

Mark was awarded for his involvement in organizations such as HMMT and for helping out the community by typing up lecture notes, coordinating psets collaboration, reaching out to prospective math majors, and setting up Discord servers for advanced graduate courses.

Matija was recognized for organizing collaborative problem-solving sessions, mentoring fellow students, and initiating events.

George was acknowledged as “the GOAT” for his ability to introduce many to the “beauty of math” and to department resources. He also often leaves math problems on random boards across campus that draw interest from students, faculty, and even visitors.

Graduate student Max Daniels was called “a cornerstone of our community” for his work with the Pumagrass Seminar, the annual department retreat, and the graduate student open house.

This award is named in honor of the late Department instructor Peter Baddoo, who received the Community Building Award in 2022 for organizing tea and coffee hours for the postdoc community.

Congratulations, George, Mark, Matija, and Max!

Leighton Family Professor of Mathematics Scott Sheffield is among seven winners of the 2025 Teaching with Digital Technology Awards for using digital technology to improve teaching and learning at MIT.

The student-nominated Teaching with Digital Technology Awards, for instructors who have effectively used digital technology to improve teaching and learning at MIT, are co-sponsored by Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. This year, students submitted 88 nominations. The winners will be honored at a celebratory luncheon in May.

Past Department recipients are professors Steven Johnson ’95, PhD ’01 in 2022, Semyon Dyatlov and Jonathan Kelner SM ’05, PhD ’06 in 2020, and former lecturer Jerry Orloff PhD ’85 in 2021.

Congratulations, Scott!

Henry Cohn ’95 will receive the 2024 School of Science Undergraduate Teaching Prize for his dedication to teaching.

Henry was recognized for teaching 18.510 and 18.701. Nominators highlighted “his engaging instruction and his ability to make a difficult class rewarding and fun.”

The School of Science awards Teaching Prizes for Graduate and Undergraduate Education to faculty members who are nominated by students and colleagues for their demonstrated excellence in teaching.

Past recipients include Michael Artin, Denis Auroux, Jonathan Kelner '05, PhD '06, Arthur Mattuck, William Minicozzi, James Munkres, Bjorn Poonen, Hartley Rogers, and Alar Toomre ‘57.

Congratulations, Henry!

The 2025 Jon A. Bucsela Prize in Mathematics has been awarded to senior math major Sanjana Das for distinguished scholastic achievement, professional promise, and enthusiasm for mathematics.

Congratulations, Sanjana!

MIT’s Xi Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa will induct 34 mathematics majors, among a total of 101 chosen from the Class of 2025. The induction ceremony is May 28.

Founded in 1776, Phi Beta Kappa is the nation’s oldest academic honor society. Membership is awarded to students in recognition of excellent academic records and commitment to the objectives of a liberal education.

Full list of Mathematics Inductees

Congratulations to our newest members of Phi Beta Kappa!

Leighton Family Professor of Mathematics Scott Sheffield is among the 120 new members and 30 international members elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Members are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Membership is one of the highest honors that a scientist can achieve. He joins 19 other department members who have been elected to the NAS.

Congratulations, Scott!

Instructor Lior Alon is one of nine postdocs and research scientists to receive the School of Science’s 2025 Infinite Expansion Award, which highlights extraordinary members of the MIT community.

Lior was nominated by John Urschel, who wrote, “I find that Lior revels in learning about different areas of mathematics, in particular, how his expertise can help others, and vice versa.”

Lior was previously a postdoctoral researcher hosted by David Jerison, as part of the Simons collaboration on localization of waves. His research lies within mathematical physics, and intersects with various mathematical disciplines, including Fourier Analysis, Spectral Geometry, Graph Theory, Morse Theory, Real Algebraic Geometry, Dynamics, and Number Theory.

Congratulations, Lior!

George Lusztig has received a 2025 Basic Science Lifetime Award at the 2025 International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS 2025).

He was recognized for "his unparalleled contributions to representation theory, and the profound influence of the theory of Deligne–Lusztig varieties, and Kazhdan–Lusztig theory."

Congratulations, George!

Alan Edelman is recognized as a 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow for distinguished contributions and outstanding breakthroughs in high-performance computing, linear algebra, random matrix theory, computational science, and in particular for the development of the Julia programming language.

The 2024 Fellows class of 471 includes scientists, engineers, and innovators recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.

Read more in the MIT News.

Congratulations, Alan!

Daniel Wyler Stroock, MIT professor emeritus of mathematics, passed away on March 13, 2025, in hospice at his home in Cambridge, surrounded by his wife Lucy and his sons, Benjamin (Ben) and Abraham (Abe). He served on the MIT faculty for 26 years until he retired in 2010, but continued teaching as professor post-tenure through spring 2024.

Please read more about Dan’s life and work here.

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

Math majors Serena An, Luke Fitzgerald, Yongao Hu, June Kayath, Jiwoo Park, and Leqi (Alexis) Zhou are among 36 MIT students named 2025 Burchard Scholars by the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS).

The Burchard Scholars program recognizes sophomores and juniors who have demonstrated have demonstrated excellence and engagement in the humanistic fields, but can major in science, design, and engineering fields as well as the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

Congratulations, Alexis, Jiwoo, June, Luke, Serena, and Yongao!

Graduate students Ryan Chen and Alex Cohen have been awarded 2025 Clay Research Fellowships, for a term of five years.

Ryan Chen is an arithmetic geometer whose research focuses on themes surrounding Gross–Zagier-type formulas for high-dimensional Shimura varieties. He is advised by Wei Zhang.

Alex Cohen researches harmonic analysis, combinatorics, and microlocal analysis. He is advised by Larry Guth.

Other current Fellows with MIT Math connections include former postdocs Maggie Miller and Alexander Smith, in 2021; postdoc Alexander Petrov in 2022; and 2024 PhDs Ishan Levy and Mehtaab Sawhney, who received it last year.

Congratulations, Alex and Ryan!

The Rhodes Trust has selected recent MIT graduate Yiming Chen as one of four Rhodes China Scholars. This scholarship will support her study next year at Oxford University. Chen graduated from MIT in 2024 with an SB in math and computer science and an MEng in computer science.

Please read more about her award on the WIM website.

Congratulations, Yiming!