News Archive

Toby Colding has been appointed as the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Mathematics.

Congratulations Toby!

Three out of the four awards in mathematics went to RSI and PRIMES students.

William Kuszmaul of PRIMES received a $10,000 scholarship for the project, "Equivalence Classes of Permutations Created Under Pattern-Replacement Relations" (mentor Darij Grinberg).

Joshua Brakensiek of RSI 2012 received a $10,000 scholarship for the project, "Bounds on the Size of Sound Monotone Switching Networks Accepting Permutation Sets of Directed Trees" (mentor Aaron Potechin).

Jacob McNamara of RSI 2012 received an honorable mention for the project, "A Bound on the Norm of Shortest Vectors in Lattices Arising from CM Number Fields" (mentor Mitka Vaintrob).

Full listing of Davidson Fellow Laureates

Congratulations Laureates!

Debbie Bower, Shirley Entzminger, Susan Fontes Moura and Avisha Lalla received the Infinite Mile Award of the School of Science for their tremendous contributions to the Mathematics Department. The Award recognizes those individuals who have gone Above and Beyond in their work.

Clark Barwick is the new Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Assistant Professor of Mathematics.

Laurent Demanet is the new Class of 1954 Career Development Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics.

The Department of Mathematics recently held its annual awards ceremony to honor the accomplishments of our graduate students.

Nan Li, Ailsa Keating and John Lesieutre received the Charles and Holly Housman Award for Undergraduate Teaching.

Paul Seidel presents the Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Prize to Yin Tat Lee and Eric Marberg, for their outstanding papers accepted for publication in a major journal.

Holden Lee received the Mathematics Department's Jon A. Bucsela Prize for distinguished scholastic achievement. He also recevied a Gates Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge.

Yangzhou Hu was an Honorable Mention Awardee of the Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman.

Noam Angrist, a math and economics major, received a Fulbright Scholarship to work in Botswana next year on educational reform.

Saturday-Sunday, May 18-19 Rm. 4-237

Victor Kac and David Vogan were recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences .

Congratulations Victor and David!

Results of the 2012 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition are in: MIT has 3 of the 5 Putnam Fellows and 12 of the top 25 scorers. We also have 34 of the 84 students with Honorable Mention or above; thus over 40% of the high-scorers are our students!

MIT Putnam Fellows:

• Benjamin Gunby
• Mitchell Lee
• Zipei Nie

Other MIT students in top 25:

Whan Ghang, Sung Gi Park, Szu-Po Wang, Tianyou Zhou, Alex Zhu, Joshua Alman, Holden Lee Jeffrey Shen, Ka Yu Tam

MIT Honorable Mentions:

Robi Bhattacharjee, Justin Brereton, Lucas Camelo Sa, Kevin Chen, Alexander Cole, Michael Cohen, Zheng Fan, Brian Hamrick, Jiaoyang Huang, Hyun Sub Hwang, Kuan-Yu Lin, Eric Mannes, Ofir Nachum, Jonathan Schneider, Brandon Tran, Mark Velednitsky, Anderson Wang, Anthony Wang, Michael Wu, George Xing, Kerry Xing, Dai Yang

Check all the results

Jacob Fox and Sug Woo Shin are among the six MIT faculty members receiving Sloan Research Fellowships this year.

The School of Science has announced that Jon has received the Teaching Prize for Undergraduate Education.

Cesar Duarte is to Receive the MIT Excellence Award. President Rafael Reif will present the award, in the category of "Innovative Solutions" to Cesar this spring. Cesar has contributed to many of the Department's design projects and has been a valuable resource in the planning process of the upcoming renovations.

Chelsea Walton is Awarded a 2013 Infinite Kilometer.

This honor is in recognition of Chelsea's hard work and leadership in PRIMES Circle, a new program established for mathematically talented students with underprivileged backgrounds. PRIMES Circle owes much of its success to her enthusiasm and dedication.

Institute Professor Emeritus Chia-Chiao Lin passed away Sunday morning in Beijing. He joined the Mathematics Faculty in 1947 and retired in 1987. He was a seminal figure in applied mathematics. MIT news

David Jerison is a co-winner, with his collaborator Jack Lee (University of Washington), of the 2012 Bergman Prize.

The Wolf Foundation has recently announced that Mike Artin will receive the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. Israel's President Shimon Peres will officially award the prizes this spring.

Our 2012 Newsletter 1ntegraL is Out!

Mathematics Senior Yangzhou Hu won Honorable Mention for the 2013 Alice T. Schafer Prize for undergraduate women demonstrating excellence in mathematics, marking the seventh year in a row that an MIT student has won Honorable Mention or more in the Schafer Prize.

Congratulations Yangzhou!

All eight regional finalist awards in the 2012 Siemens Competition in Massachusetts and New Hampshire in all fields went to PRIMES students . Also, two PRIMES students and five RSI students are Siemens semifinalists.

Congratulations to the winners and to PRIMES and RSI mentors and staff!

Among the 22 nationally selected high school student laureates, three of the prizes were awarded for projects in mathematics, and all three went to students mentored at MIT's Department of Mathematics, two at PRIMES and one at  RSI .

The laureates are:

• PRIMES Student David Ding received first prize for the project, "Infinitesimal Cherednik Algebras of gl_n" (mentor Sasha Tsymbaliuk);
• RSI Student Sitan Chen , for the project, "On the Rank Number of Grid Graphs" (mentor Jesse Geneson);
• PRIMES Student Xiaoyu He , for the project, "On the Classification of Universal Rotor-Routers" (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova).

The 2012 Hartley Rogers Jr. Prize for the best SPUR paper has been awarded to Sophomore Amol Aggarwal and his mentor, Graduate Student Gouzhen Wang, for the project, "Using Difference Operators to Determine the Correlation Functions of the Schur Process," suggested by Alexei Borodin.

The 24th International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC'12) , held this year at Nagoya University in Japan, has awarded the honor of best student paper to Joel Lewis and Yan Zhang. Their paper is titled "Enumeration of Graded (3 + 1) - Avoiding Posets."

Principal Research Scientist Andrew Sutherland has been awarded the Selfridge Prize for his paper, "On the Evaluation of Modular Polynomials." This distinction is given in recognition of the best paper presented at the biennial Algorithmic Number Theory Symposium.

Paul Seidel and Alice Guionnet have been included among the 21 mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and theoretical computer scientists who have been selected as Simons Investigators in this inaugural year for the Simons Investigators program.

Read more in the MIT News

The Department of Mathematics recently held its annual awards ceremony to honor the accomplishments of the student body. This year the Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Prize was awarded to Steven Sam for his outstanding paper. Sheel Ganatra, Hoeskuldur Halldorsson, and Alejandro Morales received the Charles and Holly Housman Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Undergraduate student Fan Wei has received the Jon A. Bucsela Prize for distinguished scholastic achievement.

Pavel Etingof has been appointed a Robert E. Collins Distinguished Scholar.

Congratulations Pavel!

Jacob Fox has been selected to receive the Edmund F. Kelly Research Award.

Congratulations Jacob!

Bonnie Berger and Bjorn Poonen were recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Congratulations Bonnie and Bjorn!

Victor Kac has been included in the first round of Simons Fellows in Mathematics .

Congratulations Victor!

Erin McGrath, Director of Development for Math and Physics, received a 2012 MIT Excellence Award, the highest award given to MIT staff.

Congratulations Erin!

Andrew Sutherland received an Infinite Kilometer Award for his outstanding contributions to UROP, freshman advising, SPLASH and HSSP.

Congratulations Andrew!

Alejandro Rodriguez-Wong received an Infinite Kilometer Award for his commitment to outreach in the larger community, especially to underrepresented minorities and for many other deeds and accomplishments.

Congratulations Alejandro!

Congratulations to Igor Rodnianski, co-recipient of the 2011 Fermat Prize .

David Vogan has been elected to be the next AMS President starting 2013.

Senior math major Fan Wei won the Alice T. Schafer Prize for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics . In the past five years our students won at least an honorable mention in this award, making this now an amazing six-year run.

Our Autumn 2011 Newsletter is Out!

New Faculty Endowed Chair Appointments

Gil Strang has been appointed as MathWorks Professor, a new endowed chair in our department.

Mark Behrens has been appointed to the Cecil and Ida B. Green Career Development Chair.

Professor Scott Sheffield has been awarded the Loeve Prize .

Congratulations Scott!

The Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation has granted tenure to Steven Johnson, effective July 1, 2011.

Congratulations, Steven!

Professor James McKernan has been elected a new Fellow of the Royal Society .

Congratulations James!

PRIMES Annual Conference

Saturday, May 21, 2011
Room 4-370, MIT

Open to the public

Faculty, Instructors, and graduate students interested in mentoring or proposing projects for PRIMES in the future are encouraged to attend.

Johnson Prize for Research

Congratulations to Vedran Sohinger and Steven Sivek , who have both been awarded the Johnson Prize for Research.

Housman Award for Teaching

Congratulations to Linan Chen and Joel Lewis for receiving the Housman Award for Teaching.

Bucsela Prize for Undergraduate Achievement

Congratulations to Alexandr Zamorzaev who has won the Bucsela Prize for Undergraduate Achievement.

Anna Pogosyants Award for a UROP in CSAIL

Congratulations to Paul Christiano for winning the Anna Pogosyants Award for a UROP in CSAIL.

Bonnie Berger has been invited to give the prestigious Margaret Pittman Lecture, sponsored annually by the National Institute of Health.

Congratulations Bonnie!

Jon Kelner received MIT's Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award which recognizes a junior faculty member for exceptional distinction in teaching and research.

Congratulations Jon!

Peter Shor was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Congratulations Peter!

April 20 - April 27

Steven Strogatz (Cornell University)
Title: Sync, Balance, and Blog

Manjul Bhargava (Princeton University)
Title: Orbits of Group Representations and Arithmetic

Professor Bjorn Poonen is one of this year's Guggenheim Fellows .

Congratulations Bjorn!

Assistant Professor Laurent Demanet is among the three MIT faculty members to receive a Sloan Research Fellowship this year.

Congratulations Laurent!

Professor Bjorn Poonen is awarded the MAA Chauvenet Prize for his paper, "Undecidability in number theory."