At 13, Carolina Ortega ’21 was one of only three young women participating in her native Colombia’s Mathematics Olympiad. She admired the other two, both high school seniors heading to the International Mathematical Olympiad, and when she heard the following year that both were studying in Massachusetts, “that’s when I discovered there was a place […]

As a graduate student at UT Austin, Lisa Piccirillo quickly came up with a solution to the Conway knot problem — which helped her land her tenure-track position at MIT. She joins our department as assistant professor this July. Read more in Quanta. Piccirillo’s proof appeared in Annals of Mathematics in February.

November 19, 2019 A new study found that boys and girls tend to start life with similar math abilities. Starting off, boys and girls tend to process math in similar ways. The researchers suggest that negative stereotypes and other socio-cultural factors may also be steering girls and young women away from math and related fields. […]

Even at MIT, sometimes less is more. by Jiaming Zeng ’15Feb 27, 2019 Math alum Jiaming Zeng ’15 is pursuing a PhD in management science and engineering at Stanford. Photo courtesy of Jiaming Zeng ’15 In the fall of my junior year, after almost two years of debating, I finally decided to supplement my major […]

Data-sampling method makes “sketches” of unwieldy biological datasets while still capturing the full diversity of cell types. “These are like sketches on paper, where an artist will try to preserve all the important features of a main image,” says our math prof Bonnie Berger. Read more at the MIT News.

Algorithm developed by Bonnie Berger and other researchers stitches multiple datasets into a single “panorama,” which could provide new insights for medical and biological studies. See MIT News.