Congratulations to Rina Foygel Barber!
On October 4, 2023, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the 2023 MacArthur Fellows. Among this distinguished group is Rina Foygel Barber, Professor of Statistics at the University of Chicago and a member of AIM’s Scientific Research Board. Rina was also the organizer of an AIM SQuaRE. For a brief description of her work see the MacArthur Foundation announcement.
AIM has moved to Pasadena!
After more than two decades in the Bay Area, AIM has moved to its new home on the Caltech campus in Pasadena. On July 10, 2023, AIM began operating in the new Richard Merkin Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics, a research center and conference space that has been established in connection with AIM’s move to Caltech, with support from Richard N. Merkin and the Merkin Family Foundation.
More information can be found under Visitors in the main menu above and also in the original announcement of the new AIM-Caltech partnership.
Alexanderson Award
The American Institute of Mathematics has announced the fourth Alexanderson Award. The award is given in honor of Gerald Alexanderson, Professor of Mathematics at Santa Clara University and founding chair of AIM’s Board of Trustees. The Alexanderson Award recognizes outstanding research articles arising from AIM research activities that have been published within the past three years.
The recipients of this year’s Alexanderson Award are Jan Bruinier, Benjamin Howard, Stephen S. Kudla, Michael Rapoport, and Tonghai Yang for their paper “Modularity of generating series of divisors on unitary Shimura varieties” published in two parts as a monograph in 2020 in volume 421 of the series Astérisque published by the Société Mathématique de France.
On January 4, 2023, all five recipients were honored at the Prize Session of the 2023 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston, and on January 6 Stephen Kudla delivered the Alexanderson Award Lecture. Read more…
AIM Director Brian Conrey with award winners Jan Bruinier, Tonghai Yang, Stephen Kudla
Congratulations to Melanie Matchett Wood!
On October 12 the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the 2022 MacArthur Fellows. Among this distinguished group is Melanie Matchett Wood, Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, and member of AIM’s Scientific Research Board. She has been associated with AIM since 2009 when she was named as an AIM Five Year Fellow. Her research ranges across broad areas of number theory with particular emphasis on probabilistic questions in arithmetic geometry. Melanie received her PhD in 2009 from Princeton and has held faculty positions at Stanford, Wisconsin, and Berkeley.
50 Years of Number Theory and Random Matrix Theory
This past summer from June 21 to 24, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton hosted a conference to celebrate the conversation between Hugh Montgomery and Freeman Dyson that took place in the IAS tea room in April 1972. It was then that anyone first realized that the distribution of distances between pairs of zeros of the Riemann zeta-function behaves (after rescaling) like the distribution of distances between the eigenvalues of large random Hermitian matrices.
That conversation began what is now a 50 year long dialog between the areas of number theory and random matrix theory. The conference covered the history of the interaction, explored the current research, and presented many open questions of interest that promise to keep the dialog going into the future.
For a list of speakers and titles see the conference website. The problem list from the conference is available.
Math activities for students, teachers, families — just about everyone!
AIM’s Math Communities website has a new calendar of upcoming math activities you can take part in.
Math that feels good
Creating learning resources for blind students
Martha Siegel, Professor Emerita from Towson University in Maryland, was working with a blind student who needed a statistics textbook for a required course. The Braille version of the textbook required six months to prepare, a delay which caused the student a significant delay in her studies. Siegel reached out to Al Maneki, a retired NSA mathematician who is blind, and the two of them decided to do something about it.
Focusing on math textbooks initially, Siegel and Maneki pulled together a collaborative team intent on solving the problem. “We were shocked to realize there did not already exist an automated method for producing mathematics Braille textbooks,” said Alexei Kolesnikov, a colleague of Siegel at Towson University and member of the team. Read more…
