From left, David Jerison, Shengtong Zhang, Yuan Yao, Jonathan Tidor, Douglas Stryker, Ao Sun, Qiuyu Ren, Yuqiu Fu, and Ankur Moitra.
SPUR , our Summer Program in Undergraduate Research, wrapped up another ambitious season with three teams sharing the 2019 Hartley Rogers Jr. Family Prize for the best SPUR paper .
Yuan Yao and Shengtong Zhang and their mentor and SPUR alum Jonathan Tidor presented “ Equiangular Lines with a Fixed Angle ,” which judges cited as a “breakthrough solution of a longstanding problem in equiangular lines.” The panel was also impressed by their results in spectral graph theory. The project was suggested by Zilin Jiang and Yufei Zhao .
Douglas Stryker and mentor Ao Sun were awarded for “Construction of High Codimension Ancient Mean Curvature Flows and Codimension Bounds by the Tangent Flow at —∞,” for “the construction of the first example of ancient solutions to mean curvature flow for curves in higher-dimensional Euclidean space.” The panel also commended Douglas “for his superb presentation.” The project was suggested by William Minicozzi .
Quiyu Ren and mentor Yuqui Fu ’s “On the Union of Essentially Distinct δ-tubes” was cited for research on problems motivated by the Kakeya conjecture. Specifically, the panel was “impressed by the rigidity results and new insights into measures of near-convexity.” The project was suggested by Larry Guth .
The teams were among several who presented their findings before the faculty panel of Davesh Maulik , Richard Stanley , and Yufei Zhao at the annual SPUR Conference , which was held August 2, 2019. The conference was hosted by SPUR/SPUR+ faculty advisors David Jerison and Ankur Moitra , and program director Slava Gerovitch . Thanks go out to the Rogers family for their support of this program.
