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AIM moves to Pasadena in July!

On July 10, 2023, AIM will begin operating in its new home on the Caltech campus in Pasadena. Workshops and SQuaREs scheduled in June will be the last activities at the San Jose location. More information can be found under Visitors on the main menu above.

Job Announcement: Associate Director of Special Projects, AIM

In conjunction with our move to Caltech this summer, AIM is seeking an Associate Director of Special Projects to spearhead our math education and public engagement work in the L.A. area.

The primary charge of the Associate Director of Special Projects will be to develop a flagship model of an equity-focused “joyful math” ecosystem serving a large urban area. In addition to their L.A.-based work, the Associate Director of Special Projects will work closely with the Director of Special Projects to develop national strategy, evaluate programs, and manage external partnerships and collaborations. They will also play an important role in AIM’s general operations, especially with regard to communications, grant proposals, conferences, and other projects as the need arises.

Please see the full job description for more information and to apply. Review of applications will begin June 1 and will continue until the position is filled. Please contact Brianna Donaldson, Director of Special Projects, at brianna@aimath.org with any questions about the position.

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…

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.

AIM is moving to Caltech

The American Institute of Mathematics is pleased to announce a new partnership with the California Institute of Technology, Caltech.

After more than two decades in the Bay Area, AIM will move to its new home in Pasadena, CA, in 2023. AIM will be located on the Caltech campus 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.

“We are excited by this opportunity. Caltech’s energy and innovative spirit are a perfect match for AIM,” says Executive Director Brian Conrey. “Being housed on this prestigious campus and partnering with multiple departments will generate a synergy that will expand the scope of AIM’s current activities and seed new directions.”

The innovations in collaborative research which began at AIM more than 20 years ago have now become part of the culture of mathematics. “AIM’s approach aligns with the culture here at Caltech, where we are drawn to fundamental, hard problems, and where mathematics runs through research endeavors across campus,” according to Chris Umans, professor of computer science at Caltech.

AIM will continue regular operations at its current facility in San Jose until the move in the Summer of 2023.

More details are available on the Caltech website.

Covid Policy

The AIM staff is fully vaccinated, and being fully vaccinated is a requirement for participation. Other Covid-related rules, such as masking, will follow current local, state, and national rules. Santa Clara County, where AIM is located, has had among the most restrictive rules in the country, but on March 2, 2022, the indoor mask requirement was lifted. See the Public Health FAQ for further information.

Participants should carry proof of vaccination with them at all times, including when coming to AIM.

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…