News Archive

Four graduate students received the 2021 named PRIMES mentorships for exceptional mentor service.

Three received the 2021 George Lusztig Mentorships. Peter Haine is a DRP and MathROOTS mentor, and a PRIMES Circle program coordinator since 2018. Chun Hong Lo , who is a PRIMES, RSI, UROP+ and SPUR mentor, saw three PRIMES mentees become 2019 Yau Science Award USA semifinalists. Adela (YiYu) Zhang is a PRIMES, RSI, UROP+, MathROOTS, and PRIMES Circle mentor.

The new Bershadsky Mentor Award, courtesy of Michael and Victoria Bershadsky, goes to Andrey Khesin , a PRIMES mentor and MathROOTS program director.

Congratulations Peter, Chun, Adela, and Andrey, and thank you Professor Lusztig, and Michael and Victoria Bershadsky for making these mentorships possible!

Andrew Sutherland was among 46 mathematical scientists selected for the 2021 Class of American Mathematical Society Fellows .

He was recognized for "contributions to number theory, both on the theoretical and computational aspects of the subject."

Congratulations Drew!

Graduate students Ashwin Sah and Mehtaab Sawhney will receive the 2021 AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student, for their work as MIT undergraduates. Previously, they received Honorable Mention for the Morgan Prize for their joint work with David Stoner. The award recognizes their innovative results across a broad range of topics in combinatorics, discrete geometry, and probability.

Congratulations Ashwin and Mehtaab!

Assistant Professor Lisa Piccirillo was selected for an inaugural 2021 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize , created in 2019 by the Breakthrough Foundation to recognize outstanding early-career women in mathematics. Lisa is cited for “resolving the classic problem that the Conway knot is not smoothly slice.” She was also recently named one of this year's WIRED25 for "People Who Are Making Things Better."

“I can’t wait to see what comes next from these brilliant young women,” said School of Science Dean Nergis Mavalvala, congratulating Lisa Piccirillo, fellow New Frontiers prizewinner and 2018 Math PhD alum Nina Holden, and two women faculty physicists, each selected for the Breakthrough's New Horizons Prize in Physics.

Read more in the MIT News.

Congratulations Lisa!

Professors Semyon Dyatlov and Jonathan Kelner and CLE Moore Instructor Pei-Ken Hung each received the 2020 Teaching with Digital Technology Award for enhancing on-campus and remote teaching.

"They worked very hard to improve teaching and learning for MIT students in this digital era, and they also helped the rest of the department get up to speed," says Department Head Michel Goemans .

The awards are student-nominated and co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor .

Read more at the MIT News.

Congratulations Semyon, Pei-Ken, and Jon!

Elchanan Mossel has been selected by the Department of Defense for a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship for his research on information flows on networks.

He is among eight distinguished faculty scientists and engineers who will be provided fellowship funds "to advance transformative, university-based fundamental research."

Congratulations Elchanan!

Alexei Borodin and Zhiwei Yun were each selected to receive a 2020 Simons Investigator award in Mathematics.

This program "supports outstanding theoretical scientists in their most productive years, when they are establishing creative new research directions, providing leadership to the field and effectively mentoring junior scientists."

They are among 15 of the 2020 Simons Investigators in Mathematics, Physics, Astrophysics, and Computer Science.

Alexei and Zhiwei join their fellow Simons Investigators Larry Guth, Elchanan Mossel, Bjorn Poonen, and Paul Seidel.

Congratulations Alexei and Zhiwei!

Gigliola Staffilani was honored with the Committed to Caring (C2C) award by the Office of Graduate Education. The C2C program recognizes outstanding mentors and promotes thoughtful, engaged mentorship throughout the Institute.

“Her students spoke glowingly of her caring action and the positive impact she has made on graduate student lives,” says Department Head Michel Goemans.

Gigliola was one of 12 outstanding advisors and mentors at MIT to receive the biennial C2C award.

Read more in the MIT News .

Congratulations Gigliola!

Yufei Zhao received this year’s UROP Outstanding Mentor Award , presented to research mentors who have demonstrated exceptional guidance and teaching in a research setting. Yufei's undergraduate mentees have already produced numerous high-quality results and published in prestigious venues. Beyond their research projects, Yufei offers guidance on their decision making, and personally assists in finding summer internships. Students wrote that Yufei "made research mathematics less intimidating to us and truly sparked our interests in combinatorics." "Professor Zhao is invested in our success."

Complete list of 2020 Awards Convocation honorees

Congratulations Yufei!

Ju-Lee Kim is this year’s recipient of the Earll M. Murman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising , "presented to a faculty member who has served as an excellent advisor and mentor for undergraduates and who has had a significant impact on their personal lives and academic success." Ju-Lee is also recognized for expanding her services as Major Advisor Co-Chair to make the Math Major more inclusive and supportive.

Complete list of 2020 Awards Convocation honorees

Congratulations Ju-Lee!

This year’s Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education was presented to Gilbert Strang by the Graduate Student Council. Gil was recognized for “his ability to make mathematics alive, accessible, and interesting.” His classes and texts on Linear Algebra , Matrix Methods In Data Analysis, Signal Processing, and Machine Learning , and Highlights of Calculus have inspired MIT undergrads and PhD students, as well as millions via his YouTube and OCW lectures. His newest textbook, "Linear Algebra for Everyone," is coming out later this year.

Read more about Professor Strang’s contributions to education at MIT News.

Complete list of 2020 Awards Convocation honorees

Congratulations Gil!

The Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation has approved the promotion of Jörn Dunkel to Associate Professor with Tenure, effective July 1, 2020.

Congratulations, Jörn!

Marisa Gaetz ‘20 received the William L. Stewart, Jr. Award , given in recognition of outstanding contributions by an individual student or student organization to extracurricular activities and events.

Timothy Leplae-Arthur ‘20 received the Ronald E. McNair Scholarship, established in Dr. McNair’s honor by the Black Alumni/ae of MIT, to recognize a Black undergraduate who has demonstrated strong academic performance and who has made a considerable contribution to the minority community.

Sam Turton PhD ’20 received the John S.W. Kellett '47 Award, in recognition of an MIT individual or group for an exceptional and/or sustained commitment to creating a more welcoming environment at MIT, including but not limited to, improving the experience of lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender (LBGT), and questioning individuals.

Complete list of 2020 Awards Convocation honorees

Congratulations Marisa, Timothy, and Sam!

Twelve of our students have been awarded 2020 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships.

Undergraduates:

• Marisa Gaetz
• Michael Kural
• Allen Liu
• Ashwin Sah
• Roshni Sahoo
• Maya Sankar
• Mehtaab Sawhney
• Douglas Stryker
• Sarah Wu
• Michelle Xu

Graduate Students:

• Oron Propp
• Zhi Ren

The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees.

Congratulations!

The Xi Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa has elected 39 mathematics majors, among 117 electees from MIT’s Class of 2020, to become members. Phi Beta Kappa is the nation's oldest academic honor society with a very selective invitation process. 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!

Congratulations to our 26 doctoral candidates receiving their PhDs this spring!

Graduate students Oscar Mickelin and Richard Zhang have each been awarded the 2020 Charles and Holly Housman Award for excellence in teaching. This award is presented to graduate students in mathematics for skill and dedication in undergraduate teaching.

Congratulations Oscar and Richard!

The 2020 Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Prize for a research paper accepted for publication in a major journal, went to Andrew Ahn , a fifth-year doctoral candidate.

His paper, Global Universality of Macdonald Plane Partitions , has been accepted for publication in Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré .

Congratulations Andrew!

MIT math senior Mehtaab Sawhney received a prestigious Churchill Scholarship to pursue graduate studies at Cambridge University. This scholarship is awarded to individuals with exceptional academic talent and outstanding achievement.

Read more in the MIT News.

Congratulations Mehtaab!

Anlong Chua and Douglas Stryker each received the 2020 Jon A. Bucsela Prize in Mathematics for distinguished scholastic achievement, professional promise, and enthusiasm for mathematics.

Congratulations Anlong and Douglas!

Ifeoluwapo Ademolu-Odeneye , Kevin Costello , and Edwin Song are among 38 MIT sophomore and junior students named 2020 Burchard Scholars by the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS).

The Burchard Scholars program recognizes sophomores and juniors who have demonstrated outstanding abilities and academic excellence in the humanities, arts, and social sciences as well as in STEM fields.

Read more in the MIT News.

Congratulations Ifeoluwapo, Kevin, and Edwin!

Seniors Marisa Gaetz and Maya Sankar were among 16 to receive the Hertz Fellowship.

The Hertz Fellowship is awarded annually to graduate students in science and technology who demonstrate the greatest potential to tackle the most urgent problems facing society.

Congratulations Marisa and Maya!

Math major Marisa Gaetz won Honorable Mention for the 2020 Alice T. Schafer Prize for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics, by the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Congratulations Marisa!

Sanath Devalapurkar ‘20 is among this year’s recipients of the 2020 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, in support of graduate study. He will use his fellowship to support his doctoral studies in mathematics at Harvard University.

Read more at the MIT News.

Congratulations Sanath!

Dr. Edgar Costa , a research scientist in the Simons Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation, received the 2020 Infinite Kilometer Award : for his excellent mentorship of UROP projects and math majors, development of the Bean Theory website (to track the multiple seminars and special events for number theorists in the Boston community), and for hosting the weekly coding jam , open to anyone wanting to contribute to the L-functions and Modular Forms Database (LMFDB) related to the Langlands Program. These outside commitments befit the Infinite Kilometer's recognition of a research staff member contributing "to their local and global MIT community."

Congratulations Edgar!

CLE Moore Instructor and NSF Postdoc Fellow Casey Rodriguez was selected for the 2020 Infinite Kilometer Award , recognizing postdocs and research staff for exceptional contributions to their research program and to the community. Casey is described as an outstanding junior colleague: an "inspiring teacher and role model for many math majors," a community builder for fellow postdocs, and one fully engaged in the department's diversity mission. One student described Casey as a master of class participation. "Casey doesn't simply teach mathematics, he preaches it, infecting his students with his love of math."

Congratulations Casey!

History of Science and Math Lecturer Slava Gerovitch received the Infinite Mile Staff Award for his exemplary service as Director and Administrator of the Department's Research and Reading Programs for Undergraduates and High School Students. He co-founded the PRIMES program , helped to establish EECS PRIMES, and co-created five additional PRIMES math sections — all to serve diverse groups and provide for unique instruction arrangements. As Pavel Etingof describes, Slava has made PRIMES "a powerful recruiting tool for MIT" and "a major part of the diversity effort of the Math Department and the School of Science."

Congratulations Slava!

The Department of Mathematics will receive the 2020 American Mathematical Society’s Award for Exemplary Program or Achievement in a Mathematics Department , for its Program for Research in Mathematics, Engineering, and Science for High School Students ( PRIMES ).

This award recognizes a department that has distinguished itself by undertaking an unusual or particularly effective program of value to the mathematics community, internally or in relation to the rest of society.

MIT PRIMES was founded by Pavel Etingof and Slava Gerovitch as an outreach program for high school students. To date, 408 students have participated in MIT PRIMES and PRIMES-USA, 103 completed the PRIMES Circle program, and 100 participated in the summer MathROOTS program. More than 130 PRIMES alumni have matriculated at MIT.

Read more at the MIT News.

Bonnie Berger has been 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.

Congratulations Bonnie!

Nike Sun has been awarded the 2020 Wolfgang Doeblin Prize , awarded bi-annually by the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability. The prize is awarded to a single individual for outstanding research in the field of probability, and who is at the beginning of their mathematical career.

Congratulations Nike!

For the first time in Putnam history, in the 80th annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition , all of the top scorers, designated Putnam Fellows, were from one institution, MIT! In alphabetical order, the Fellows are Ashwin Sah, Kevin Sun Yuan Yao, Shentong Zhang, and Daniel Zhu.

MIT also took 9 of the next 11 top spots, 8 of the following 12, and 33 of the 80 Honorable Mentions. Included among these participants were top female participants Dain Kim and Qi Qi. Qi was one of the three winners of the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize.

Read more at MIT News

Congratulations, everyone!

Peter Shor , with Charles H. Bennett (IBM Research) and Gilles Brassard (University of Montreal), received The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award , in the category of Basic Sciences, "for their fundamental role in the development of quantum computation and cryptology."

Peter was also recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his pioneering contributions to quantum computation.

Congratulations Peter!

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Peter Hintz , who was awarded a 2020 Sloan Research Fellowship . Peter joined our department in 2019.

He was among five MIT researchers from three departments who received the fellowship.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded 126 U.S. and Canadian early-career scientists and scholars, including 20 mathematicians, $75,000 fellowships to be used to further their research.

Professor Roman Bezrukavnikov was awarded a 2020 Simons Fellowship in Mathematics. Outstanding mathematicians recognized by the Simons Fellows program are able to extend academic leaves from one term to a full year, enabling recipients to focus solely on research for the long periods often necessary for significant advances.

Congratulations, Roman!

Larry Guth will receive the newly named Maryam Mirzakhani Prize in Mathematics (formerly the NAS Award in Mathematics) at the Academy's 157th annual meeting in April 2020.

He is recognized “for developing surprising, original, and deep connections between geometry, analysis, topology, and combinatorics, which have led to the solution of, or major advances on, many outstanding problems in these fields.” The Mirzakhani prize honors exceptional contributions to the mathematical sciences by a mid-career mathematician.

Congratulations Larry!

MIT math graduate student Murilo Corato Zanarella received the 2020 Frank and Brennie Morgan Honorable Mention Prize for his undergraduate research at Princeton University. Three students, Mehtaab Sawhney '20, Ashwin Sah '20, and RSI alum David Stoner (graduate of Harvard, and now a graduate student at Stanford) were jointly awarded for their collection of papers on a wide range of topics in discrete mathematics. The Morgan Prizes were presented in January at the 2020 Joint Mathematics Meeting.

Congratulations, everyone!

Alexei Borodin has been awarded the 2019 Fermat Prize for the invention of integrable probability theory, a new area at the interface of representation theory, combinatorics, and statistical physics.

The prize also went to Maryna Viazovska, professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

The Fermat Prize is awarded every two years by the Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse to one or several mathematicians under the age of 45, for contributions to an area where Pierre de Fermat's work was particularly influential: statements of variational principles; foundations of probability and analytical geometry; and number theory.

Alexei will also receive the 2020 Bernoulli Prize for an Outstanding Survey Article. He and his co-author, Leonid Petrov of the University of Virginia, were recognized for their article in Probability Surveys .

Congratulations Alexei!

Bonnie Berger has been selected to give the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture at the 2020 SIAM Annual Meeting.

This Prize highlights the achievements of women in applied and computational mathematics. It was jointly established in 2002 to honor Sonia Kovalevsky and her work on the theory of differential equations.

Congratulations Bonnie!

Professor George Lusztig presented Yongyi Chen , Vishal Arul , and Kaavya Valiveti with 2020 George Lusztig PRIMES mentors awards at the Department’s annual Winter Social on December 3, 2019.

Yongyi Chen is a PRIMES 2011 alumnus who has served as a PRIMES , SPUR , and UROP+ mentor since 2017. His PRIMES student Kaan Dokmeci is a 2018 Regeneron STS scholar and a 2017 Siemens regional finalist .

Vishal Arul has served as a PRIMES and MathROOTS mentor since 2016, and has been the Academic Coordinator of MathROOTS since 2017. His PRIMES student Dhruv Rohatgi is a 2016 Siemens semifinalist and a 2017 Regeneron STS scholar .

Kaavya Valiveti began as a PRIMES mentor this year, and is leading two reading projects simultaneously.

Congratulations to Vishal, Yongyi, and Kaavya, and thank you George for making the Lusztig mentorship possible!

PhD candidate Lucas Mason-Brown is among those named to this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneurs listing. His work as a cofounder of Data for Black Lives has built a network of more than 4,000 scientists and activists committed to using data to create measurable change in the lives of black people. He shares this accolade with the organization’s co-founder, Yeshimabeit Milner.

Congratulations Lucas!

Gilbert Strang has been elected as a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), in the section of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science.

Gil is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Congratulations Gil!

The American Mathematical Society has chosen Larry Guth to receive the 2020 Bôcher Memorial Prize .

Larry received the prize for his “deep and influential development of algebraic and topological methods for partitioning the Euclidean space and multi-scale organization of data, and his powerful applications of these tools in harmonic analysis, incidence geometry, analytic number theory, and partial differential equations.” Larry wrote about this technique in his book “ Polynomial Methods in Combinatorics .”

“Larry is being recognized for two outstanding papers that use polynomial partitioning, a powerful technique first introduced by Larry together with Nets Katz for their solution of the Erdos distinct distance problem in incidence geometry,” said Department Head Michel Goemans.

The other 2020 Bôcher Prize recipients are Camillo De Lellis and Laure Saint-Raymond, and previous recipients from MIT include Richard Melrose and Isadore Singer .

Congratulations, Larry!

Chenyang Xu was among 52 mathematical scientists selected for the 2020 Class of American Mathematical Society Fellows .

He was recognized for “contributions to algebraic geometry, in particular the minimal model program and the K-stability of Fano varieties.”

Congratulations Chenyang!

Congratulations to the winners of the 11th annual Math Prize for Girls created and organized by the Advantage Testing Foundation, which was hosted by the MIT Math Department during the weekend of October 12-13, 2019. The competition drew 276 girls from across the US and Canada to compete for cash prizes. Gigliola Staffilani gave the Maryam Mirzakhani keynote lecture, named in honor of Mirzakhani, who was the first woman mathematician to receive the Fields Medal.

Read more at the MIT News.

For his work on the Julia programming language, Alan Edelman has been selected to receive the 2019 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award .

Edelman was cited “for outstanding breakthroughs in high performance computing, linear algebra, and computational science and for contributions to the Julia programming language.”

One of the IEEE Computer Society's highest honors, the Sidney Fernbach Award recognizes outstanding contributions in the application of high-performance computers (HPC) using innovative approaches.

Fernbach Lecture Video

Read more about his award at the MIT News

Congratulations Alan!

Victor Kac will join Galileo and Einstein as a member to the Accademia Nationale dei Lincei, the oldest science academy in the world.

“I was quite surprised and profoundly honored,” says Kac, who joins only 20 other Accademia foreign members in math, such as Fields medalists Pierre Deligne, Pierre-Louis Lions, David Mumford, and Shing-Tung Yau.

Read more at the MIT News .

Congratulations Victor!

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.

Wei Zhang received the 2019 Clay Research Award, in recognition of his work in arithmetic geometry and arithmetic aspects of automorphic forms . Presented by the Clay Mathematics Institute , the award notes his “landmark contributions” that include a proof of the global Gan-Gross-Prasad conjecture for a wide class of automorphic representations of unitary groups, a proof he did with Zhiwei Yun of a higher-order generalization of the Gross-Zagier formula over function fields, and a proof of Kolyvagin’s conjecture on the structure of Selmer groups for a large class of elliptic curves over Q.

He formulated an arithmetic version of the Gan-Gross-Prasad Conjecture – a vision for a far-reaching generalization of the Gross-Zagier formula over number fields – and pioneered a relative trace formula approach to its proof. He recently achieved a major step in this program by proving the Arithmetic Fundamental Lemma.

The award was presented to Wei Zhang at the Clay Research Conference in Oxford in October 2019. In 2017, Wei was awarded the 2018 New Horizons in Mathematics Breakthrough Prize with Zhiwei Yun.

Congratulations Wei!

A record number of Davidson Institute Fellowships received — 4! — were collected by our PRIMES high school students this summer. They swept all three prizes in math, and won the only award in Massachusetts.

Two received 2019 Davidson Fellowships:

Aayush Karan , 17, of Muskego, WI, received the $25,000 Davidson Fellowship for his project “Generating Set for Nonzero Determinant Links under Skein Relation,” done under the mentorship of CLE Moore instructor Dr. Jianfeng Lin, and published in Topology and Its Applications 265 (2019). He said in his award statement, “Under Dr. Lin’s mentorship, I not only completed my project in knot theory but was able to learn a great deal about the research process.” Aayush has entered MIT as a freshman this fall.

Daniel Zhu , 17, of Potomac, MD, received the $10,000 scholarship for his project "On the Okounkov-Olshanski formula for the number of tableaux of skew shapes,"" under mentor UMass-Amherst Prof. Alejandro Morales, MIT Math PhD '12. In his statement, he said that Prof. Morales was "a constant source of ideas, suggestions, or just simply motivation."

Two others received honorable mentions: Merrick Cai, who also is attending MIT this fall, and was mentored by Daniil Kalinov ; and Sanjit Bhat of Acton, MA, under mentor Dimitris Tsipras of EECS.

"I wish to congratulate PRIMES Chief Advisor Pavel Etingof , Head Mentor Tanya Khovanova , and the mentors , and to thank them for their dedication and hard work!" said PRIMES Director Slava Gerovitch .

42 = (-80538738812075974) ³ + 80435758145817515 ³ + 12602123297335631 ³

Read more at the MIT News .