News Archive

Professor emeritus Daniel Z. Freedman has been awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He shares the $3 million prize with two colleagues, Sergio Ferrara of CERN and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen of Stony Brook University, with whom he developed the theory of supergravity.

“Dan’s work on supergravity has changed how scientists think about physics beyond the standard model, combining principles of supersymmetry and Einstein’s theory of general relativity,” says Michael Sipser, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Donner Professor of Mathematics. “His exemplary research is central to mathematical physics and has given us new pathways to explore in quantum field theory and superstring theory.”

Read more about Dan’s achievement in the MIT News .

Congratulations Dan!

Bonnie Berger was honored by the International Society for Computational Biology for the Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award at the ISMB/ECCB Conference, July 21-25, 2019 in Basel, Switzerland. At the conference, Bonnie presented the keynote address, "Biomedical Data Sharing and Analysis at Scale."

The ISCB Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award recognizes leaders in the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics for their significant research, education, and service contribution.

Congratulations Bonnie!

Zhiwei Yun received the Gold Medal of Mathematics at June’s 8th International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (ICCM) in Beijing.

At the last Congress, which was in 2016, Zhiwei had received a Silver medal, and Wei Zhang received a Gold medal.

Formerly known as the Morningside Medal of Mathematics, this recognition is given to exceptional mathematicians of Chinese descent under the age of 45 for their achievements in pure and applied mathematics.

Congratulations Zhiwei!

Elchanan Mossel has been named a 2019 Simons Investigator in Mathematics.

This award is given to outstanding theoretical scientists to support long-term investigations of fundamental questions.

Congratulations Elchanan!

The MIT Corporation Executive Committee has approved faculty promotions for Semyon Dyatlov and Ankur Moitra . Semyon and Ankur were promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure.

Read more about them and six other recently promoted School of Science professors at MIT News .

Congratulations Semyon and Ankur!

Laurent Demanet has been promoted from Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics to Professor of Applied Mathematics.

Congratulations Laurent!

Professor Larry Guth has been selected as the Claude E. Shannon Professor of Mathematics.

Congratulations Larry!

Professor Bjorn Poonen has been appointed as the inaugural Distinguished Professor in Science by the School of Science.

Congratulations Bjorn!

Associate Professor Nike Sun has been honored with an award through the Faculty Early Career Development Program for her project “Phase Transitions in Randomized Combinatorial Search and Optimization Problems.”

Congratulations Nike!

Math alum Eric Larson PhD ’18 earned the 2019 Hertz Thesis Prize from the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation for providing a proof for a long-unsolved mathematical problem as his April 2018 doctoral thesis “The Maximal Rank Conjecture.”

“To have a mathematics thesis win a Hertz Thesis Prize is extremely special. It’s never happened before,” said Hertz Fellow Thomas Weaver. “In my opinion, this is the most remarkable thesis in pure math that I’ve ever seen a Hertz Fellow produce.”

Larson continues to work on the interpolation problem with his wife, Isabel Vogt PhD ’19. They will both complete postdoctoral appointments at Stanford next year, then begin tenure-track faculty positions at the University of Washington in 2020.

Read more about Eric’s thesis and the award.

Congratulations Eric!

Ahaan Rungta received the Harold J. Pettegrove Award, given in recognition of outstanding service to intramural athletics.

Luke Sciarappa received the Frederick Gardiner Fassett Jr. award, presented annually to up to three individuals of the Fraternities, Sororities, and Independent Living Groups (FSILG), who have most unselfishly demonstrated the qualities of spirit, dedication, and service in furthering the ideals of MIT brotherhood, sisterhood, and membership excellence.

Congratulations Ahaan and Luke!

Graduate students Vishal Arul , Gweneth McKinley , and Sam Turton have each been awarded the 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 Vishal, Gwen, and Sam!

The 2019 Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Prize for a research paper accepted for publication in a major journal went to Cesar Cuenca , a fifth-year doctoral candidate.

His paper “ BC type z-measures and determinantal point processes ” was published in Advances in Mathematics on August 20, 2018.

Congratulations Cesar!

MIT awarded Bill Minicozzi the Outstanding Veteran First-Year Advisor award, and Yufei Zhao the Innovative First-Year Seminar award for his Putnam Seminar .

The award ceremony was held on May 16 in the Student Center, to celebrate the outstanding contributions of first year students, their advisors, and associate advisors.

Congratulations Bill and Yufei!

Math major Ashwin Sah received the Barry Goldwater Scholarship for 2019-2020. Mentored by Yufei Zhao and Joseph Gallian (University of Minnesota Duluth), Ashwin was among 496 college students selected on the basis of academic merit, from a nationwide field of candidates.

Read More at MIT News

Congratulations Ashwin!

Senior Yunkun Zhou has received the 2019 Jon A. Bucsela Prize in Mathematics for distinguished scholastic achievement, professional promise, and enthusiasm for mathematics.

Congratulations Yunkun!

Gilbert Strang ’s Linear Algebra class now exceeds 10 million views on OpenCourseWare . That’s the kind of math that makes him one of the most recognized mathematicians in the world.

“He is a favorite; there is no way around it,” says OCW Director Curt Newton. “It’s clear that Gil’s teaching has struck just the right chord with learners and educators around the world.”

He also published his 12th book to accompany his latest class, 18.065 (Matrix Methods in Data Analysis, Signal Processing, and Machine Learning.)

Read more about Gil at MIT News .

Doctoral student Kristin Marie-Dettmers Kurianski has been chosen as an honoree in the 2019 biennial celebration of Graduate Women of Excellence. The celebration by the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education recognizes graduate women based on their leadership and service contributions at the Institute, their dedication to mentoring, and their drive to make changes to improve the student experience.

Kristin and others were recognized on April 29, where honorees presented posters on their accomplishments and future plans.

Congratulations Kristin!

Professor Peter Shor receives the 2018 Micius Quantum Prize , "for his groundbreaking theoretical work on factoring algorithms and quantum error correction." The Micius Quantum Prize is given by the recently established Micius Quantum Foundation, in recognition of "significant science advance ranging from the early conceptual contributions to the recent experimental breakthroughs." Professor Shor is one of six Micius Quantum Prize recipients.

Read more at MIT News .

Congratulations Peter!

Professor David Jerison has been awarded a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation . He is among 168 winners, chosen among nearly 3,000 applicants. David will use the fellowship to study interfaces that divide regions in optimal ways, such as those interfaces that minimize energy, cost, or loss of information.

Read more at MIT News .

Congratulations David!

Department Staff Members Kimberli DeMayo (Human Resources Coordinator) and Jonathan Harmon (Faculty Support) are among this year’s recipients of the School of Science Infinite Mile Award . Both were nominated in the "Beyond Expectations" category, consistently going above and beyond their job expectations.

Congratulations Kim and Jonathan!

Lecturer Tanya Khovanova will receive the School of Science Infinite Mile Award , in the "Mentor Award" category.

Tanya is the head mentor of the math section of MIT's Research Science Institute (RSI), and since its inception in 2010, of MIT PRIMES . She was nominated for her exceptional ability to guide her colleagues and inspire them to attain goals.

Congratulations Tanya!

Professor Victor Kac was awarded a 2019 Simons Fellowship in Mathematics.

Outstanding mathematicians recognized by the Simons Fellows program are able to extend sabbatical leaves from one term to a full year, enabling recipients to focus solely on research for the long periods often necessary for significant advances. Victor will spend his 2019-2020 sabbatical at the University of Rome, La Sapienza.

Congratulations Victor!

The Edmund F. Kelly Research Award has been awarded to Assistant Professor Andrew Lawrie . Every three years, the mathematics department gives this award to a junior faculty member "in recognition of work that applies mathematical methods to a new area or that offers a fundamentally new perspective on a classical problem."

Congratulations Andrew!

Several in the MIT math community received Best Paper Awards from the 2018 International Consortium of Chinese Mathematicians in December. Awardees included:

• Semyon Dyatlov for the paper “ Semiclassical measures on hyperbolic surfaces have full support, ” which he wrote with Long Jin for Acta Mathematica
• Yufei Zhao , former professor Jacob Fox, and NSF postdoc fellow László Miklós Lovász for “ On regularity lemmas and their algorithmic applications ,” in Combinatorics Probability & Computing
• Larry Guth , with Xiumin Du and Xiaochun Li, “ A sharp Schrödinger maximal estimate in R ² ” Annals of Mathematics
• CLE Moore Instructors Pei-Ken Hung and Zhouli Xu

The ICCM Global Selection Committee included Bjorn Poonen , and the award ceremony featured a Distinguished Lecture by George Lusztig .

Professor Tom Leighton PhD ’81 received SC Media's first ever Visionary award as Akamai Technologies' chief executive officer, at the 23rd annual SC Awards gala on March 6, 2019, in San Francisco. The Visionaries of the Last 30 Years category honors those who have shaped the industry and will serve to impact the future.

Akamai also took home the Best Web Application Solution award for its Kona Site Defender  web application.

Congratulations Tom!

Congratulations to Ewain Gwynne PhD ’18, who has been named a 2019 Clay Research Fellow . Ewain, whose PhD advisor was Scott Sheffield , is now a postdoc at the University of Cambridge.

Clay Research Fellows are recent PhDs who are selected for their research and their potential to become leaders in research mathematics.

Peter Hintz is also a Clay Research Fellow. Past fellows include professors Roman Bezrukavnikov, Alexei Borodin, Semyon Dyatlov, Davesh Maulik, and Aaron Pixton.

Congratulations Ewain (and Scott!).

In the 79th annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition , the team of Junyao Peng, Ashwin Sah, and Yunkun Zhou took second place, behind Harvard. Yuan Yao and Shengtong Zhang were among the five Putnam Fellows.

MIT took 9 of the next 10 top spots, including Danielle Wang, who will receive her second Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize. (Danielle recently was also a runner-up in the 2019 Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize from the AWM .)

Our students took 6 of the next 12 spots, and 28 out of 74 honorable mentions. In total, MIT students dominated in the demanding six-hour mathematics competition, taking 45 of the top 101 spots.

“I am super proud of our students' performance on the Putnam Competition,” said Yufei Zhao, our Putnam coach. “The number of high scorers from MIT shows the unparalleled strength of our undergraduate math community.”

Administered by the Mathematical Association of America on December 1, the competition included 164 MIT students among 4,623 test-takers from 568 U.S. and Canadian institutions.

Read more at MIT News .

Congratulations!

Simons Professor of Mathematics Bonnie Berger has been selected as the 2019 recipient of the International Society for Computational Biology Senior Scientist Award.

ISCB is the premier society in computational biology and bioinformatics with 3,400 members. The ISCB annual award recognizes “highly significant, long-term career achievement,” in Bonnie’s case for visionary, foundational, and deep contributions to the field.

“It’s a tremendous honor to join such a distinguished and accomplished group of scientists,” Bonnie said.

Bonnie will receive this award and will be giving the Senior Scientist keynote at the ISMB/ECCB 2019 meeting July 21–25, 2019, in Basel, Switzerland.

She was also named an ISCB Fellow in 2012.

Congratulations Bonnie!

Congratulations to Andrew Lawrie and Yufei Zhao , who were among four at MIT awarded 2019 Sloan Research Fellowships . Andrew has been an assistant professor with us since 2016, and Yufei since 2017.

Sloan Fellows are selected on “the basis of a candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity, and potential to become a leader in his or her field.”

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded 126 U.S. and Canadian early-career scientists and scholars $70,000 fellowships to be used to further their research.

Read more in the MIT News .

"It was a feeling of solving something that most people couldn’t solve, I think, that triggered my interest," said Zhiwei Yun , of being in third grade when he discovered an interest in math. Read about Zhiwei's transition into math research, why he came to MIT, and more in the MIT News .

Aden was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. Previous recipients include Paul Dirac and Peter Higgs. Aden will pursue his research program in applied mathematics at the University of Oxford. Aden worked with Jörn on “ Functional Control of Network Dynamics Using Designed Laplacian Spectra ,” published December 7, 2018, in Physical Review X.

Jonasz was awarded an ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellowship , and will be hosted by the group of Prof. Roman Stocker , a former MIT math instructor. Jonasz and Jörn collaborated on mirror-symmetry breaking and turbulence in active fluids, published in PNAS and Journal of Fluid Mechanics .

Congratulations Jonasz, Aden, and Jörn!

For the upcoming year, Christian Gaetz , Zhulin Li , and Chris Ryba have been selected as 2019 George Lusztig PRIMES mentors .

Christian has served as a PRIMES , DRP , and UROP+ mentor since 2017. His PRIMES student Ayush Agarwal is a 2018 Regeneron STS scholar .

Zhulin has served as a PRIMES, RSI , and DRP mentor since January 2017.

Chris has served as a PRIMES and UROP+ mentor since 2017. His PRIMES student Mihir Singhal is a 2018 Regeneron STS scholar.

Congratulations to Christian, Zhulin, and Chris, and thank you Professor George Lusztig for making the Lusztig mentorship possible!

PRIMES alumnus Ravi Jagadeesan uses his bagel to explain the concept of a Riemann surface as part of his 2013 PRIMES presentation. Now a PhD student at Harvard, he received the 2019 AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student. In his acceptance note, Ravi thanked PRIMES and Pavel Etingof .

Congratulations Ravi!

Senior Radha Mastandrea and Kyle Swanson ’18 are among five MIT students awarded Marshall Scholarships .

Radha, a physics and mathematics double major*, will study theoretical and experimental physics at Cambridge University before returning to the United States to pursue her PhD in high-energy particle physics.

Kyle graduated with a double major in mathematics and computer science, and a minor in music, and will receive his MEng in computer science and engineering this spring. As a Marshall Scholar, Swanson will study mathematics and computer science at Cambridge.

*Radha has since withdrawn from being a math major

Bonnie Berger , Larry Guth , Elchanan Mossel , Zhiwei Yun , and Wei Zhang were among 65 mathematical scientists selected for the 2019 Class of American Mathematical Society Fellows .

They were recognized for “outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics,” with the following citations:

• Bonnie Berger for contributions to computational biology, bioinformatics, algorithms, and for mentoring;
• Larry Guth for contributions to harmonic analysis, combinatorics, and geometry, and for exposition of high-level mathematics;
• Elchanan Mossel for contributions to probability, combinatorics, computing, and especially the interface between them;
• Zhiwei Yun for contributions to geometry, number theory, and representation theory, including his construction of motives with exceptional Galois groups;
• Wei Zhang for contributions to number theory, algebraic geometry, and geometric representation theory.

Congratulations Bonnie, Larry, Elchanan, Zhiwei, and Wei!

PRIMES-USA student intern Espen Slettnes won first place in Mathematics at 2018 Broadcom MASTERS , a national science and engineering competition for middle-school students.

Espen is a home-schooled eighth grader from Castro Valley, California, who presented at the PRIMES conference in May. Espen’s project was "Minimal Embedding Dimensions of Rectangle k-Visibility Graphs," under mentor Jesse Geneson PhD ’15. Jesse and Espen will also have asteroids named in their honor by MIT Lincoln Lab, as part of the Ceres Connection program.

“Our PRIMES students continue to win all the top awards in the country, and they are getting even younger!” said Department Head Michel Goemans . “Congrats to Espen (and Jesse), and to Slava Gerovitch , Tanya Khovanova , and Pavel Etingof for creating and directing such an amazing, highly successful math enrichment program.”

Chenyang Xu will receive a 2019 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize for his work on the Minimal Model Program in algebraic geometry.

The "early-career" version of the Breakthrough Prize is awarded to promising junior researchers who have already produced important work in mathematics.

Prior to joining our department this year, Chenyang was a professor at the Beijing International Center of Mathematical Research. He recently spoke at ICM 2018 , and was awarded China’s inaugural Future Science Prize in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2017.

Previous MIT recipients of the New Horizons Prize in Mathematics are Larry Guth in 2016, and Wei Zhang and Zhiwei Yun in 2018.

Read more about the winners and where to watch the awards ceremony at the MIT News .

Semyon Dyatlov received the 2018 Early Career Award from the International Association of Mathematical Physics at July’s International Congress on Mathematical Physics in Montreal, Canada.

Given in recognition of a single achievement in Mathematical Physics, this triennial award went to Semyon for his “introduction and the proof of the fractal uncertainty principle (FUP), which has important applications to quantum chaos and to observability and control of quantum systems.”

Semyon recently also received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Mathematical Sciences for “Classical and Quantum Chaos.”

Congratulations Semyon!

Vadim Gorin earned the 2018 Young Scientist Prize of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics .

The award, received in July at International Association of Mathematical Physics’ International Congress on Mathematical Physics , in Montreal, Canada, is “for his groundbreaking work on the universality of local correlations in random tilings and nonintersecting random walks, and the discovery of locally interacting particle systems linked to random matrix ensembles.”

Congratulations Vadim!

Two students participating in PRIMES and RSI recently received $25,000 Davidson Fellows Scholarships.

PRIMES-USA participant Franklyn Wang, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology and Regeneron Science Talent Search 2018 finalist, won for solving a math problem that has puzzled mathematicians for nearly a century. Franklyn presented his findings in his paper "Monodromy Groups of Indecomposable Rational Functions," mentored by Prof. Michael Zieve of the University of Michigan.

David Wu , now an MIT freshman, wrote his paper under mentor and MIT doctoral student Robert Burklund , as part of the 2017 RSI math program class. The paper, “Nonuniform Distributions of Patterns of Sequences of Primes in Prime Moduli,” aims to improve methods for gathering data on prime number patterns by several orders of magnitude, and may be applied to cryptography and cybersecurity. David was also a 2017 Siemens semifinalist and a 2018 Regeneron STS finalist .

Three other PRIMES students earned honorable mentions: Ayush Agarwal of San Ramon, CA, Louis Golowich of Lexington, MA, and Michael Ma of Plano, TX.

The 2018 Davidson Fellows will be recognized in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Sept. 28, 2018. PRIMES and RSI programs last year were run by faculty advisors Pavel Etingof , David Jerison , and Ankur Moitra , program director Slava Gerovitch , and head mentor Tanya Khovanova .

Julia, a free, open-source programming language created by Alan Edelman and others at MIT, was officially launched as Julia 1.0 at the recent JuliaCon in London.

“The release of 1.0 says that Julia is now ready to change the technical world by combining the high-level productivity and ease of use of Python and R with the lightning-fast speed of C++,” said Alan, in a CSAIL article.

Julia, used by technical coders at such places as Google, Facebook, and the Department of Energy, has helped power self-driving cars and MIT robots , and used in such fields as precision medicine , augmented reality , and genomics .

See CSAIL’s article on Julia 1.0.
See YouTube video “A Conversation with Gilbert Strang,” where Gil spoke at JuliaCon about linear algebra and computational math.
Listen to Alan talk about Julia 1.0 with WBUR.

Ankur Moitra and Bill Minicozzi were among four recipients of the School of Science’s 2018 Teaching Prizes for Graduate and Undergraduate Education.

Ankur was awarded the prize for graduate education for a course he designed called “Algorithmic Aspects of Machine Learning” (18.S996/18.409). Notes from this class have been turned into a monograph, which has already been used in courses across the country. Nominators said Moitra distinguished himself as an inspirational, caring, and captivating teacher.

Bill was awarded the prize for undergraduate education for his teaching of “Multivariable Calculus” (18.02). Students consistently praised his clarity, ability to engage the class, and sense of humor. Nominators also noted his ability to treat difficult topics at an appropriate pace in his upper-level undergraduate courses.

The prizes are awarded annually to School of Science faculty members who demonstrate excellence in teaching. Winners are chosen from nominations by their students or colleagues.

Read more at the School of Science .

If you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment: Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends. Now bend it until it breaks. How many fragments did you make? If the answer is three or more, pull out another stick and try again. Can you break the noodle in two? If not, you’re in very good company.

It’s nearly impossible to break a dry spaghetti noodle into only two pieces. Showing how it’s done is an MIT study by Jörn Dunkel , his graduate student Vishal Patil , instructor Norbert Stoop , and others.

The spaghetti challenge, which flummoxed even the likes of famed physicist Richard Feynman ’39, was solved in their paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

Read more on MIT News.

The 2018 Hartley Rogers Jr. Family Prize for the best SPUR paper was awarded to three teams, to be split evenly, as decided by the faculty committee ( Ju-Lee Kim , Bill Minicozzi , and Elchanan Mossel ).

SPUR student Julius Baldauf-Lenschen and mentor Ao Sun were awarded “for a sharp lower bound for the entropy of immersed curves with type 1 singularities and an excellent, clear presentation.” The project was suggested by Bill Minicozzi.

SPUR+ students Juan Gil and Joshua Amaniampong and mentor Jake Wellens , who suggested the project, were awarded "for new theoretical applications of partial rejection sampling and their practical implementation."

SPUR student Dhruv Rohatgi and mentor Jake Wellens were awarded "for elegant design constructions, their application to bi-partite clique partitions and for novel contributions to ordered Ramsey theory." The project was suggested by Asaf Ferber .

Congratulations to all of the students and mentors. We also appreciate everyone who helped out, including those who provided ideas for the projects , all of the mentors, SPUR/SPUR+ faculty advisers Davesh Maulik and Ankur Moitra , and the program director, Slava Gerovitch , along with the Rogers family for their support of this program.

Peter Shor has been awarded the IEEE’s 2018 Eric E. Sumner Award for Outstanding Contributions to Communications Theory, specifically "for contributions to quantum communication and information theory."

He also received the 2017 Information Theory Society Paper Award for "The Quantum Reverse Shannon Theorem and Resource Tradeoffs for Simulating Quantum Channels," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory , May 2014, which he wrote with MIT Physics Professor Aram Harrow, Charles Bennett, Igor Devetak, and Andreas Winter. This award is given annually for an outstanding publication in the fields of interest to the Society appearing anywhere during the preceding four calendar years.

Congratulations Peter!

Yufei Zhao has been named the second recipient of the School of Science’s Future of Science Award . Among other research accomplishments, Yufei with three undergraduates solved an open problem concerning the number of independent sets in an irregular graph—a conjecture first proposed in 2001.

Yufei was also recently named the Class of 1956 Career Development Assistant Professor, effective July 2018. Last month, SIAM awarded Yufei the 2018 Dénes König Prize , given biennially to an early career researcher for outstanding research in discrete mathematics.

“Yufei exemplifies the best of our faculty members,” says Department Head Michel Goemans. “He is a skilled, creative researcher who is also an outstanding teacher and mentor both in and outside the classroom.”

Congratulations Yufei!

Jonathan Kelner has been promoted from Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics to Professor of Applied Mathematics.

Congratulations Jonathan!

Professor Pavel Etingof has been awarded MIT’s Frank E. Perkins award for Excellence in Graduate Advising . Named in honor of Frank E. Perkins, Dean of the Graduate School from 1983-85, this award is presented to a faculty member who demonstrates unbounded compassion and dedication toward students. He also earned this award in 2015.

Congratulations Pavel!