News Archive

The Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Prize for a research paper accepted for publication in a major journal went to four students in 2018:

• Ewain Gwynne
  Almost sure multifractal spectrum of SLE
  Duke Mathematical Journal
• Jonasz Slomka
  Spontaneous mirror-symmetry breaking induces inverse energy cascade in 3D active fluids
  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Amelia Perry and Alex Wein
  Optimality and Sub-optimality of PCA for Spiked Random Matrices and Synchronization
  Annals of Statistics

Congratulations!

Graduate students Kevin Sackel and Jane Wang 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 Kevin and Jane!

Math major Sammy Luo '18 received the 2018 Jon A. Bucsela Prize in Mathematics for distinguished scholastic achievement, professional promise, and enthusiasm for mathematics.

Congratulations Sammy!

Math major Bertrand Stone ’18 received the 2018 Louis Sudler Prize for his contributions to music at MIT, including his flute concerto, which was premiered by MITSO last fall.

Read more about Bertrand at Arts at MIT .

Congratulations Bertrand!

Academic Services staffer Theresa Cummings is one of this year’s recipients of the School of Science Infinite Mile Award . Theresa was nominated for the “Beyond Expectation Award,” for consistently going above and beyond the requirements of her job to make the Math Department a better place.

Theresa manages the complex enterprise surrounding the department's massive service courses (18.01, 18.02, 18.03, ...), as well as managing all of the make-up, conflict, special-needs, and advanced standing exams, and a host of other special topics. She is also an important point of contact with the Registrar’s Office, Student Disability Services, the UAAP, GECD, and other departments.

Congratulations Theresa!

Alexei Borodin and Larry Guth have been elected as Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . With members including many of the most accomplished scholars and practitioners worldwide, the American Academy is one of the country's oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers.

Congratulations Alexei and Larry!

Gigliola Staffilani is this year’s recipient of the Earll M. Murman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising .

The award is "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."

The award was presented at the 2018 Awards Convocation Thursday, May 10 in the Samberg Center.

Congratulations Gigliola!

Chord , Antony Gormley’s 3D steel sculpture in the Simons Building, has received an award for fabrication and installation from the American Institute of Steel Construction.

Projects such as Chord selected for recognition will be announced at the 2018 NASCC: The Steel Conference in Baltimore on April 11. Awards will be presented to the submitting firms and their project team at the individual project sites in the spring and summer of 2018. And winning projects will be featured in the May issue of Modern Steel Construction magazine.

Sponsored by the American Institute of Steel Construction, the Innovative Design in Engineering and Architecture with Structural Steel (IDEAS2) “recognizes projects where structural steel has been utilized in an innovative manner.”

The sculpture was installed on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the building, as a percent-for-art project in association with the Simons renovations.

The Mathematics Department ranked first in the QS World University Rankings for 2018. ( MIT also received a number 1 ranking in 11 other subject areas.)

Quacquarelli Symonds Limited subject rankings, published annually, are designed to help prospective students find the leading schools in their field of interest. Rankings cover 48 disciplines and are based on an institute’s research quality and accomplishments, academic reputation, and graduate employment.

The Department’s PhD program tied with Harvard, Stanford and U.C. Berkeley for a No. 2 spot (following Princeton at No. 1) in the U.S. News and World Report’s 2018 rankings. U.S. News last ranked the nation’s top PhD programs in the sciences in 2014, when mathematics tied with Princeton University for the No. 1 spot.

Professor Tom Leighton has been selected to receive the 2018 Marconi Prize. The Marconi Society, dedicated to furthering scientific achievements in communications and the Internet, is honoring Leighton for his fundamental contributions to technology and the establishment of the content delivery network (CDN) industry.

Leighton ’81, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and a member of CSAIL, will be awarded at The Marconi Society’s annual awards dinner in Bologna, Italy, on Oct. 2.

“Being recognized by the Marconi Society is an incredible honor,” said Leighton. “It’s an honor not just for me, but also for Danny Lewin, who created this company with me, and for all of the people at Akamai who have worked so hard for over two decades to make this technology real so that the internet can scale to be a secure and affordable platform where entertainment, business, and life are enabled to reach unimagined potential."

Congratulations Tom! Read more in the MIT News .

Congratulations to Ankur Moitra for receiving the 2018 Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for his proposed research "An Algorithmic Theory of Robustness." His research falls under ONR's Mathematical Data Science program .

Ankur was one of 31 scientists "awarded for research that holds strong promise across a wide range of naval-relevant science and technology areas."

The list of recipients is available from the ONR, and details about the program can be found on the ONR Website .

Congratulations Ankur!

Alexei Borodin , jointly with Ivan Corwin and Patrik Ferrari, received the inaugural Alexanderson Award for their article "Free energy fluctuations for directed polymers in random media in 1+1 dimensions," Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 67 (2014). This work began during the October 2011 AIM workshop "The Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation and universality class."

The American Institute of Mathematics' award is given in honor of Gerald Alexanderson, Professor of Mathematics at Santa Clara University and founding chair of the AIM Board of Trustees. The Alexanderson Award recognizes outstanding research articles arising from AIM research activities that have been published within the past three years.

Congratulations Alexei!

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Yufei Zhao , SB '10, PhD '15, who is the 2018 recipient of the Dénes König Prize.

His award is based on the paper he co-authored with David Conlon and Jacob Fox, "A relative Szemerédi theorem," published in Geometric and Functional Analysis 25 (2015). This paper was completed during his PhD at MIT.

The König Prize will be awarded at the SIAM Conference on Discrete Mathematics , to be held June 4-8 at the University of Colorado, in Denver, Colorado.

The SIAM Activity Group on Discrete Mathematics (SIAG/DM) Dénes König Prize is awarded biennially to an early career researcher or early career researchers for outstanding research in an area of discrete mathematics, based on a publication in the three calendar years prior to the year of the award.

Congratulations Yufei!

The results of the 78th annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition:

Our 1st Place Team:
Allen Liu, Sammy Luo, and Yunkun Zhou.

Our Putnam Fellows:
Omer Cerrahoglu, Jiyang Gao, Junyao Peng, Ashwin Sah, and Yunkun Zhou.

MIT students were among 4,638 test-takers from 575 institutions last December, and once again produced the highest number of top individual scorers. In addition to having the 1st place team and 5 out of the 6 highest ranking individuals named Putnam Fellows, MIT had 5 of the next 9 top scorers, and 7 of the next 10. In addition, 21 out of 74 students who received honorable mention were from MIT. In total, 38 out of 100 top scorers are MIT students.

This is our fourth time in the past five years that the MIT team ranked first.

...Full List of Winners

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Andrei Neguț and Tristan Collins , who were among those awarded a 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship. Andrei has been an assistant professor with us since 2015, and Tristan will be joining us as assistant professor this fall. Andrei was among eight MIT researchers from six departments who were awarded 2018 Sloan Research Fellowships . The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded 126 American and Canadian researchers fellowships that are given to early-career scientists and scholars identified as rising stars among the next generation of scientific leaders. Fellows receive $65,000 to be used to further their research.

Congratulations Andrei and Tristan!

Congratulations to Professor Emeritus James R. Munkres , who was named a Fellow by the American Mathematical Society. He was honored for contributions to algebraic topology, and for exposition.

Congratulations James!

MIT PRIMES program participant Franklyn Wang took second place at the final 2017 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology on Dec. 5. Franklyn, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, is part of the MIT PRIMES-USA distance mentoring math research program, in which high school students complete a challenging math research project over 12 months. His $50,000 award was for solving a longstanding mathematical problem that has a wide range of potential applications.

PRIMES students Swapnil Garg and his team and Anlin Zhang and her team were also finalists and earned $25,000 scholarships at the National Finals, which were held at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., December 1-­5, 2017.

This year, PRIMES has collected 28 Siemens Competition awards : 21 semifinalists, 4 regional finalists, and 3 national finalists (including the second place winner).

For the full list of PRIMES honors and awards, please visit the PRIMES web page .

Congratulations to Franklyn, Swapnil, and Anlin!

Calculating the cost of tech-fueled discrimination, MIT mathematics graduate student Lucas Mason-Brown’s Data for Black Lives conference provided numbers behind the technologies that enable exclusion.

Read more at MIT News

School of Science Dean Michael Sipser was among four MIT faculty named Association for Computer Machinery 2017 Fellows for making “landmark contributions to computing.”

Sipser has made numerous contributions to complexity theory, and in particular on circuit complexity, multi-interactive proof systems, the use of expanders, and quantum computing.

He will be recognized at the ACM’s annual awards banquet June 23, 2018, in San Francisco, California.

A member of CSAIL and the Donner Professor of Mathematics, Mike received the MIT Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellowship in 2016 in recognition of his commitment to undergraduate education. He also received the Irwin Sizer Award from the MIT Graduate School Council for the development with Professor Tom Leighton of the 18C major Mathematics with Computer Science. Mike is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Mathematical Society.

Congratulations Mike!

For the upcoming year, Zhenkun Li , Gwen McKinley , and Ao Sun have been selected as 2018 George Lusztig PRIMES mentors .

Zhenkun has served as a PRIMES , RSI , and DRP mentor since 2016. His RSI 2016 student Dona-Maria Ivanova won the Fourth Award in Math at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2017. Gwen was the √mathroots program director from 2016 to 2017, and in 2017 she was honored as one of MIT's Graduate Women of Excellence . Ao has served as a PRIMES, RSI, and DRP mentor since 2016.

Professor George Lusztig used a significant part of his 2014 Shaw Prize in mathematics to help endow the PRIMES mentorships, which recognize math doctoral candidates who offer exceptional mentoring to high school students involved in the PRIMES program.

Congratulations to Zhenkun, Gwen, and Ao, and thank you George for making the Lusztig mentorship possible!

Alan Edelman PhD ’89, an Applied Mathematics professor in the Department of Mathematics at MIT, has been named a 2018 Fellow of the IEEE for his "contributions to the development of technical-computing languages," namely the Julia language for numerical/scientific computing.

“It is a great pleasure for me to see the Julia project being recognized. For me, this is about the thousands of contributors,” Edelman said. “Often software is not recognized in academic environments as research, but this is clearly changing.”

Julia is widely described as being the solution to “The Two Language Problem,” where a high-level language is easier to use, but is not suitable for “real world” use—people needed to prototype in one language, but then need to translate to another language for performance in serial, in parallel, or on GPUs. Created with Jeff Bezanson PhD ’15, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral Shah, Julia is now used worldwide in businesses, classes, and in research.

The next JuliaCon will be Aug. 7-11, 2018, in London. Edelman has served as executive chair for JuliaCon from 2015-2017, and remains on the committee.

Congratulations Alan!

Professors Wei Zhang and Zhiwei Yun have been awarded the New Horizons in Mathematics Breakthrough Prize, which is given to promising junior researchers who have already produced important work in mathematics. The team of Wei and Zhiwei were recognized Sunday “for deep work on the global Gan-Gross-Prasad conjecture and their discovery of geometric interpretations for the higher derivatives of L-functions in the function field case.” Zhiwei, currently a professor at Yale University, will be joining the Department of Mathematics next month. “I am delighted that the joint work of these two recently hired faculty members is being recognized by this prestigious award,” said Interim Department Head Michel Goemans, who attended the ceremony. “Their work on the Taylor expansion of L-functions constitutes the most important progress in 30 years towards the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, one of the seven Clay Millenium problems.”

Applied Mathematics doctoral candidate and former NFL player John Urschel was a presenter at the ceremony, which was held at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Larry Guth won the 2016 New Horizons in Mathematics prize for “ingenious and surprising solutions to longstanding open problems in symplectic geometry, Riemannian geometry, harmonic analysis, and combinatorial geometry.”

Adjunct Professor Henry Cohn received the 2018 Levi L. Conant Prize from the American Mathematical Society at the Joint Math Meeting for his article "A Conceptual Breakthrough in Sphere Packing," published in the February 2017 issue of the Notices of the AMS. Henry is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and his research interests include discrete mathematics, broadly interpreted. Professor David Vogan received the Levi L. Conant Prize in 2011.

“It's a pleasure and an honor to receive the 2018 Levi L. Conant Prize,” said Henry. “The /E/_8 and Leech lattices are fascinating objects, and I hope readers will grow to love them as much as I do.”

Describing Henry’s award, the AMS announcement stated: “In 2016, Maryna Viazovska gave an astounding solution to the sphere packing problem in dimension 8. Just a week later, (Abhinav) Kumar, (Stephen D.) Miller, (Danylo) Radchenko, and Viazovska solved the sphere packing problem in dimension 24 by similar ideas. Cohn's article unfolds the dramatic story behind these proofs. What is special about 8 and 24 that makes the proof work only in these dimensions? The answer is that there are truly extraordinary sphere packings in these dimensions, arising from the /E/_8 lattice in dimension 8 that appears in Lie theory, and the Leech lattice in dimension 24 that is so closely connected with finite simple sporadic groups.”

Congratulations, Henry!

Applied Mathematics doctoral candidate and former NFL player John Urschel will be a presenter at the sixth annual Breakthrough Prize ceremony on Sunday, Dec. 3.

"I think I'm more honored than anything to be thought of as someone who should present such an award," said Urschel.

The Breakthrough honors top achievements in the fields of mathematics, fundamental physics, and life sciences. Larry Guth won the 2016 New Horizons in Mathematics prize for "ingenious and surprising solutions to longstanding open problems in symplectic geometry, Riemannian geometry, harmonic analysis, and combinatorial geometry."

Held at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, the event will be livestreamed at 10pm(EST)/7pm(PST) on Breakthrough Facebook , Breakthrough YouTube , National Geographic Facebook and National Geographic YouTube .

Urschel’s fellow presenters will be actors Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, and Kerry Washington, and the event will be hosted by actor Morgan Freeman . The Breakthrough Prize is presented by founders Sergey Brin (Google), Yuri Milner (DST Global) and Julia Milner, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Priscilla Chan (Chan Zuckerberg Initiatives), and Anne Wojcicki (23andMe), along with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.

Federico Ardila (SB '98, PhD '03), a math professor at San Francisco State University, opens up to Quanta magazine about his journey as a mathematician, teacher, Colombian transplant, DJ, and creator of mathematical spaces.

“Had I known what MIT was, I should have known not to apply. There is no way I should have applied with that kind of transcript…I like telling this story to my students because I think we often close doors to ourselves by thinking that we’re not eligible or that we’re not good enough. And especially if you’re somebody who feels ‘othered’ in your discipline or who feels like you’re lacking confidence, it’s easy to close doors on yourself. There’s a lot of people in life who are ready to close doors for you, so you can’t do it for yourself.”

Read more at Quanta

A drop or two of cold cream in hot coffee can go a long way toward improving one’s morning. But what if the two liquids didn’t mix? MIT scientists have now explained why under certain conditions a droplet of liquid should not coalesce with the liquid surface below. If the droplet is very cold, and the bath sufficiently hot, then the droplet should “levitate” on the bath’s surface, as a result of the flows induced by the temperature difference.

Professor John Bush is a member of the team, whose results, published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics , offer a detailed, mathematical understanding of drop coalescence, which can be observed in everyday phenomena, from milk poured in coffee to raindrops skittering across puddles, and sprays created in surf zones.

Read more at the MIT News

Watch the Video

Assistant Professor Giulia Saccà received the Anna Maria Molteni Award in Mathematics and Physics for her research on hyper-Kähler geometries. She was among five young Italian researchers working in North America who received 2017 ISSNAF Awards on November 8 at the Italian Embassy in Washington, D.C. ISSNAF (Italian Scientists and Scholars of North America Foundation) acknowledges young Italian researchers by presenting the ISSNAF Awards for Young Investigators in five subjects and awarding the winner in each category with a $3,000 prize.

Read more about the award on our Women in Mathematics page .

Congratulations Giulia!

This year’s MIT PRIMES contestants took home more than twice as many awards than last year as they made it past the first round of the 2017 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology.

With 20 semifinalists and 7 regional finalists, PRIMES student contestants took home 27 Siemens Competition awards this year, compared with 12 in 2016 and in 2015. They were chosen from a pool of more than 1,860 projects submitted this year.

The 101 regional finalists will now advance to the next round of the competition – the Regional Finals, in one of six regional competitions virtually hosted over three consecutive weekends in November at MIT November 3-4, along with five other schools.

PRIMES/RSI/SPUR Director Slava Gerovitch congratulated PRIMES chief research advisor Pavel Etingof , head mentor Tanya Khovanova , and the MIT mentors Jesse Freeman , Chiheon Kim , Younhun Kim , Xiaomeng Xu , and Lusztig PRIMES mentor Guangyi Yue for their dedication and hard work.

For the full list of PRIMES honors and awards, please visit the PRIMES web page.

The MIT PRIMES program has three students among the national finalists in the 2017 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology.

The finalists are PRIMES students Swapnil Garg and his team; Anlin Zhang and her team; and Franklyn Wang (in the individual category). The Regional Finals were held at MIT along with five other schools earlier this month. Winners of the regional events will advance to the National Finals to be held at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., December 4-­5, 2017.

So far, PRIMES student contestants took home 28 Siemens Competition awards this year, consisting of 21 semifinalists, 4 regional finalists and 3 national finalists.

PRIMES/RSI/SPUR Director Slava Gerovitch congratulated PRIMES chief research advisor Pavel Etingof , head mentor Tanya Khovanova , and the MIT mentors Jesse Freeman , Chiheon Kim , Younhun Kim , Xiaomeng Xu , and Lusztig PRIMES mentor Guangyi Yue for their dedication and hard work.

For the full list of PRIMES honors and awards, please visit the PRIMES web page.

Broad Institute Fellow Hilary Finucane PhD ’17 received the Early Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health. In June 2017, she completed her PhD in applied math; her research was in statistical genetics, and she was advised by Alkes Price . Hilary also recently contributed to “Association analysis identifies 65 new breast cancer risk loci” in Advance Online Publication (AOP) on www.nature.com .

Read more about Hilary on our Women in Mathematics page .

Congratulations to the winners of the 9th annual Math Prize for Girls contest, which took place on Saturday, September 24, 2017 at MIT. The competition drew 266 girls from across the US and Canada to compete for $55,000 in cash prizes. Gigliola Staffilani and School of Science Dean Michael Sipser are among the board of advisors for this event, which is held by Advantage Testing Foundation.

Read more about the competition on our Women in Mathematics page .

Bill Minicozzi and Scott Sheffield have been awarded senior faculty chairs, and Aaron Pixton has received a Career Development chair, as of this past July 1.

Bill Minicozzi now holds the Singer Professorship in Mathematics, a chair that was recently held by Tom Mrowka , and previously by Dan Stroock . This was established by the James and Marilyn Simons Professorship Fund in 1999, in honor of Institute Professor and Abel Prize winner Isadore Singer . Formerly named the Simons Distinguished Professorship of Mathematics until Professor Singer’s retirement, it was renamed in 2010.

Scott Sheffield has been awarded the Leighton Family Professorship in Mathematics, a chair previously held by Michel Goemans . The chair was established in 2007 by the Leighton Family Fund.

Both chairs are for five years, renewable once.

Aaron Pixton has received the Class of 1957 Career Development chair for a three-year term. This is an Institute chair for a junior faculty member.

Congratulations Bill, Scott, and Aaron!

The Department of Mathematics welcomes this year two new senior faculty members, Wei Zhang and Zhiwei Yun, and two junior faculty members, Giulia Saccà and Yufei Zhao .

Welcome!

Chenyang Xu , an algebraic geometer who will join our Department as Full Professor in Fall 2018, received the 2017 Future Science Prize in Mathematics & Computer Science at a ceremony in Beijing on October 29, 2017. He was recognized for his contributions to birational algebraic geometry.

The purpose of the Future Science Prize is to reward scientists that have made outstanding contributions to science and technology in Greater China. It is referred to as China's new Nobel Prize. This non-governmental prize was established last year in Life Science and in Physical Science, but Chenyang wins the inaugural Future Prize in Mathematics & Computer Science.

Congratulations, Chenyang!

PRIMES student Felix Wang, 18, of Newton, has been chosen as a 2017 Davidson Fellow with a $25,000 scholarship award for his paper, "Functional equations in Complex Analysis and Number Theory." He is one of only 20 students across the country to receive this honor. Felix, a rising college freshman at Stanford University and graduate of Roxbury Latin in West Roxbury, thanked his PRIMES mentors Pavel Etingof and Tanya Khovanova , along with grad student Thao Do and University of Michigan Professor Michael Zieve. "Both mentors provided tremendous assistance, and have always inspired and motivated me," Felix said. “I am unbelievably excited and honored to be a Davidson Fellow,” said Wang. “Mathematics has fascinated me since childhood. In middle school, I spent countless hours poring over textbooks in preparation for various math competitions, but by the time I reached high school, my interest in learning math to win competitions had faded. I searched for a more challenging and more fulfilling way to use my talents, and decided to attempt mathematics research.” He credits PRIMES as the program that fulfilled his need for a challenge.

Congratulations PRIMES and Felix!

Tom Mrowka will deliver a plenary address at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2018, which will be held August 1-9, 2018, in Rio de Janeiro.

Other MIT math faculty invited to speak at ICM 2018 include Bjorn Poonen and our new full professor Wei Zhang in the Number Theory section; new professors Zhiwei Yun and Chenyang Xu in the Algebraic and Complex Geometry section; and Alex Postnikov in the Combinatorics section. Meeting every four years, ICM is where the Fields medals are awarded.

The Clay Mathematics Institute presented Jason Miller and Scott Sheffield with the 2017 Clay Research Award , for their groundbreaking and conceptually novel work on the geometry of the Gaussian free field and its application to the solution of open problems in the theory of two-dimensional random structures. The award is "in recognition of their introduction of a novel geometric combinatorial method to study doubling properties of solutions to elliptic eigenvalue problems” ( full citation ). Scott Sheffield holds the Leighton Family Chair in Mathematics at MIT since July 2017. Jason Miller is at the University of Cambridge, and was a Schramm Fellow and an NSF Fellow at MIT under Scott’s mentorship. For those who missed it, Quanta magazine recently wrote about their research in “ A Unified Theory of Randomness .”

Before his arrival at MIT, Daniel Freedman wrote "Coherent Effects of a Weak Neutral Current," which appeared in the 1974 issue of Physical Review . His paper proposed the process called coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, specifically pointing out that it had a much larger strength than other neutrino reactions.

Dan, a theoretical physicist emeritus in the Applied Mathematics division, recently received a pleasant surprise—more than 40 years later. “I received a message from the head of an experimental collaboration of about 80 physicists telling me that the experiment had finally been realized and confirmed my prediction.”

The results of their research were detailed in an article in the latest SCIENCE magazine, “Milk jug–sized detector captures neutrinos in a whole new way.” In the article, the team describes using a device the size of a milk jug in order to observe the neutrinos scattering off atomic nuclei. This development may lead to portable neutrino detectors at nuclear facilities.

Peter Shor received the 2017 Dirac Medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, along with Charles Bennett of IBM and David Deutsch of Oxford. Peter was recognized for his groundbreaking work in quantum computation, including his quantum factoring algorithm, quantum error-correcting codes, and quantum fault-tolerant computation. The award was announced on August 8, the 115th anniversary of Paul Dirac ’s birth. Earlier recipients of the medal include Emeritus Professor Dan Freedman and several MIT physicists.

Congratulations Peter!

The 2017 Hartley Rogers Jr. Family Prize for the best SPUR paper was awarded to two teams, to be split evenly, as decided by the faculty committee ( Andrew Lawrie , George Lusztig , and Elchanan Mossel ).

Justin Lim and his mentor Frederic Koehler were awarded for their “elegant analysis and presentation of spanning Maker-Breaker games.” The project, “Building Forests in Maker-Breaker Games: Upper and Lower Bounds,” was suggested by Asaf Ferber .

Jianqiao Xia and his mentor Gus Lonergan were awarded for a “penetrating study of the intersection pattern of irreducible components of Springer fibers coming from two-row partitions.” The project, “Topology of Two-Row Type Springer Fibers,” was suggested by Roman Bezrukavnikov .

Congratulations to all of the students, mentors, and faculty who provided projects , and thanks to all mentors, SPUR faculty advisors David Jerison and Ankur Moitra , SPUR+ coordinator Cris Negron , and the program director, Slava Gerovitch , along with the Rogers family for their support of this program.

To a packed classroom, Prof. John Bush kicked off the summer SPUR/RSI lecture series with his lecture "Hydrodynamic Quantum Analogs." Led by SPUR/RSI faculty advisors David Jerison and Ankur Moitra, the afternoon series concludes with the SPUR Program Conference , featuring presentations by 13 undergraduates. Students in the program work full time for six weeks on original individual or joint research projects, as mentored by a math grad student, and at the conference, the undergraduates present their papers to mentors, peers, and a panel of faculty members.

SPUR Program
RSI Program

Math grad student Lucas Mason-Brown has been named one of 35 Echoing Green Fellows for his work with Data for Black Lives (D4BL), an organization he recently co-founded to mobilize scientists to use data science to fight racial bias in real estate, finance, criminal justice, and other areas.

Read more at the MIT News

Congratulations Lucas!

Mitch Rothstein ’77 played the title character in the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble production of King John. “I know of no other example of a college repertory company mounting a production with both current students and 40 years of alumni,” said Mitch, now a math professor at the University of Georgia and one of the ensemble’s first actors. The cast and crew included four current students and 19 alumni that have graduated as far back as 1974.

Read more at The Slice

Allan Gottlieb ’67, a pioneer in parallel computing and New York University professor, recently celebrated his 50th reunion this week at MIT. But since he was a junior in the math department he’s been creating The Puzzle Corner, a math and puzzle column that still appears in MIT Technology Review magazine. Gottlieb, who was profiled by Tech Review in 2015 , spoke to Slice of MIT about the evolution of the Puzzle Corner.

Read more at the MIT News

MIT Senior Raul Boquin remembers the assignment from his freshman year as if it were yesterday. During a leadership workshop, he was asked to write a headline for a newspaper in his imagined future. The words that came to mind resonated so strongly that they now hang on the walls of his dorm room: “Equal opportunities in education for all.”

Read more at the MIT News

In the United States, the set of professional football players has about 1,700 members, and set the PhD candidates in math also has thousands of members. In 2017, the intersection of these sets is a singleton. On an overcast day in late winter, that unique element is in the Norbert Wiener Common Room in MIT’s Department of Mathematics, where John Urschel is sitting at a table, chatting. Urschel is an offensive lineman with the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, a three-year pro with 40 regular-season games played and a couple of playoff starts on his football résumé. He is also a doctoral candidate in math at MIT who has passed his qualifying exams and has nine published or accepted research papers on his academic résumé.

Read more at Technology Review

Urschel recently announced his retirement from his football career, and will concentrate full-time on earning his PhD. His announcement came days after the release of a Boston University study showing the link between football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease.

We are welcoming 19 new students into our graduate program.

Coming from around the world, 4 are from China, 3 from Russia, 2 from Hong Kong; and others are from Thailand, Singapore, Romania, Great Britain and Colombia. Thirteen are pure math, and six are applied math. Four are women.

Four from MIT are Robert Burklund, algebraic topology; Tudor Cristea-Platon, physical applied math; and two combinatorics students, Yibo Gao and Jonathan Tidor. Three are from Harvard: Sahana Vasudevan, general pure math; Gregory Parker, geometry; and Pakawut Jiradilok, combinatorics. Three are from the Higher School of Economics in Russia: Daniil Kalinov, general math; Andrei Ionov, algebra; and Aleksandra Utilarova, lie algebra. And two are from University of Cambridge: Dominic Skinner, physical applied math, and Chun Hong Lo, algebra.

Other new students are:

• Jie Jun Ang, probability, Stanford
• Araminta Gwynne, general pure math, Northwestern
• Kai Huang, geometry, Peking University
• Chenyang Shao, analysis, Tsinghua University
• Felipe Suarez, science, University de los Andes
• Jingwei Xiao, number theory, Columbia
• Ruoxuan Yang, analysis, University of Hong Kong

Please help us welcome them to the Department of Mathematics!

Our Spring 2017 newsletter Integral is now available , and you can also check out our Simons Building Dedication insert.

Hung Cheng received the 2017 Distinguished Achievement Award in Technology and Humanity/Humanities, by the Chinese Institute of Engineers, San Francisco Bay Chapter. Cheng and his wife, Jill, also pledged $1 million last fall to the Hung and Jill Cheng Scholarship Fund, to support MIT undergraduates. Cheng was inspired to establish the scholarship through writing his novel, "Nanjing Never Cries."

Congratulations Hung!