Sign In the pianist had to make a major sacrifice: sleep Raising two young children as a single parent while holding down four teaching positions is more than enough to fill anyone’s days Trying to juggle all that and compose an album’s worth of new material had begun to feel unachievable for Carmen Sandim The Colorado-based pianist thought about setting her music career aside—not for the first time—when a viewing of the John Coltrane documentary Chasing Trane provided a much-needed jolt of inspiration “I felt like I received a message from that movie,” Sandim recalls “There’s such an intensity to both single parenting and musicianship I realized that there’s no such thing as balance There’s just do what you love or don’t do what you love and balance is what I chose to let go of.” Sandim’s solution was to forfeit two nights of sleep per week she would stay up every Friday and Monday night “The first couple of years that I had my kids The result of those binge-composing sessions is Play Doh (Ropeadope) Sounding far more celebratory than fatigued the album offers a vibrant blend of harmonically sophisticated modern jazz and rhythmic accents from the composer’s native Brazil Despite the time that parenthood inevitably took away from music Sandim intended the title to be a playful tribute to her son and daughter “Kids do this funny thing: they just amplify everything,” she explains “My heart got expanded and I felt things a lot more All of a sudden I felt like the muse had become my BFF; I just had stuff pouring out of me and I felt a lot more desire and urgency.” Are you a musician or jazz enthusiast? Sign up for our weekly newsletter Sandim fell in love with the Brazilian jazz sound epitomized by Antônio Carlos Jobim starting her down a path that eventually led to Boston’s Berklee College of Music Intimidated by her limited English at the time she focused more on composing than on performance and embarked on a successful career in composing for radio The work was lucrative but far from fulfilling “I thought that I’d be able to do both [music for ads and jazz] but the reality was that I was constantly on deadline so I got burned out after just a few years Not to mention writing music for political stuff is not exactly inspiring she left that life behind and relocated to Boulder (she now lives in Denver) where she soon encountered the vital local scene centered on the likes of Art Lande and Ron Miles Many of the key figures of that scene appear on Play Doh including Kneebody trumpeter Shane Endsley and recent transplants Khabu Doug Young (guitar) and Bruce Williamson (reeds) continuing the mentorship role he’s played since Sandim’s arrival “I pretty quickly realized that I’d come to the right place,” Sandim said “I feel like I found my musical family here.” Shaun Brady is a Philadelphia-based journalist who covers jazz along with an eclectic array of arts Brady contributes regularly to the Philadelphia Inquirer and JazzTimes and Jazziz magazines with subjects ranging from legendary artists to underground experimentalists He studied filmmaking at Columbia College Chicago and continues to spend too much time in the dark Ten years ago, while speaking with Nellie McKay about the unorthodoxy of her career, I asked about the logic of slowing her roll as a … Read More “The Roman Spring of Nellie McKay” Speaking as a transplant from California, April on the East Coast defies belief — week after week of interminable grimness surrendering to a riot of … Read More “The Efflorescence of Jeff Goldblum” Though beloved for roles on film and stage — the Criterion Collection’s new re-release of her starring vehicle, Crossing Delancey, still proves to be one … Read More “Amy Irving’s Genre-Smashing Take on the Songs of Willie Nelson” As the pandemic continued to upend society from March 2020 until restrictions gradually loosened, those lucky enough to have avoided serious illness or the loss … Read More “Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M³) Celebrates New Work from Its Fifth Annual Cohort” JazzTimes—“America’s Jazz Magazine”—provides comprehensive and in-depth coverage of the jazz scene JazzTimes is a favorite of musicians and fans alike Suggestions or feedback? MIT’s Donner Professor of Physics, has been named a 2024 Ross Brown Investigator by the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech One of eight awarded mid-career faculty working on fundamental challenges in the physical sciences Gedik will receive up to $2 million over five years Gedik will use the award to develop a new kind of microscopy that images electrons photo-emitted from a surface while also measuring their energy and momentum This microscope will make femtosecond movies of electrons to study the fascinating properties of two-dimensional quantum materials professor of physics Andrea Young at the University of California Santa Barbara was a 2011-14 Pappalardo Fellow at MIT in experimental condensed matter physics.  The Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech was established in 2023 through a $400-million gift from entrepreneur to support fundamental research in chemistry and physics Initially created as the Investigator Awards in 2020 the award supports the belief that "scientific discovery is a driving force in the improvement of the human condition," according to a news release from the Science Philanthropy Alliance A total of 13 investigators were recognized in the program's first three years Now that the Brown Investigator Award has found a long-term home at Caltech the intent is to recognize a minimum of eight investigators each year.  Other previous awardees with MIT connections include MIT professor of chemistry Mircea Dincă as well as physics alumni Waseem S MNG '06 of Princeton University; David Hsieh of Caltech who is another former Pappalardo Fellow; Munira Khalil PhD '04 and Mark Rudner PhD '08 of the University of Washington; and Tanya Zelevinsky ’99 of Columbia University This website is managed by the MIT News Office, part of the Institute Office of Communications Massachusetts Institute of Technology77 Massachusetts Avenue Sarah Millholland an assistant professor of physics at MIT and member of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, is the 2024 recipient of the Vera Rubin Early Career Award for her wide-ranging contributions to the formation and dynamics of extrasolar planetary systems.The American Astronomical Society’s Division on Dynamical Astronomy (DDA) recognized Millholland for her demonstration “that super-Earth planets within a planetary system typically have similar masses that the statistics of compact multi-planet systems are consistent with a smooth inclination distribution and that resonances trapping obliquities to high values may enhance the tidal evolution of planetary orbits.” The citation noted that her work “is distinguished by thoughtful analyses of 3D dynamical processes in planetary systems and by effective use of observational data to constrain dynamical models.” Millholland is invited to give a lecture at the 56th annual DDA meeting in spring 2025 “I am incredibly honored to receive the DDA Vera Rubin Early Career Prize and I am especially grateful to my advisors and mentors within the dynamical astronomy community,” says Millholland and I look forward to continuing to be a part of it for years to come.” Millholland is a data-driven dynamicist who studies extrasolar planets and interiors/atmospheres. She studies patterns in the observed planetary orbital architectures She specializes in investigating how gravitational interactions like tides and spin dynamics sculpt observable exoplanet properties Millholland obtained bachelor’s degrees in physics and applied mathematics from the University of Saint Thomas in 2015 She earned her PhD in astronomy from Yale University in 2020 and was a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University until 2022 The Vera Rubin Early Career Prize was established in 2016 in honor of the late Vera Rubin a longtime DDA Member and galactic dynamicist The American Physical Society (APS) recently honored five MIT community members for their contributions to physics: Professor Wit Busza Instructor Karol Bacik, postdocs Cari Cesarotti and Chao Li Wit Busza, the Francis L. Friedman Professor of Physics Emeritus, and a researcher in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, was awarded the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics “for pioneering work on multi-particle production in proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions including the discovery of participant scaling and for the conception and leadership of the PHOBOS experiment.” The prize recognizes outstanding experimental research in nuclear physics or device that significantly contributes to nuclear physics research When two protons or nuclei traveling at close to the speed of light collide It is a distinct example of energy converting to mass when lead nuclei collide in the highest-energy colliders streaming out from the tiny volume where the collision took place “It's amazing if you consider that this volume is no larger than that of a mere 100 or so of such particles,” Busza says. “The question arises: What exactly is this extremely hot (more than a billion times higher temperature than the surface of the sun) and super dense stuff before it evolved into the observed large number of created particles It is a particularly interesting question since we think it is the same stuff out of which most of our universe was made at about 10 microseconds after the Big Bang.” Busza is best known for influential pA experiments at Fermilab in which he discovered participant scaling and obtained the first data-based estimate of the energy density that will be produced in the future Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) He’s also known for originating and leading the PHOBOS experiment which together with the other RHIC experiments discovered a strongly interacting quantum chromodynamics liquid (at the time named “strongly interacting Quark-Gluon Plasma”) Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics Instructor of applied mathematics Karol Bacik received the American Physical Society’s 2023 Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics “for an elegant study of dune-dune repulsion and dune-obstacle interaction using laboratory experiments elucidating the intricate feedback between sediment dynamics and fluid mechanics.” His groundbreaking experimental and theoretical work on the dynamics of underwater sand dunes was done at the University of Cambridge From 2021-23 Bacik was a research associate at the University of Bath where he investigated a range of problems in active flows and mathematical biology.  Bacik’s award lecture will be at the 76th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics on Nov and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics Cari Cesarotti, a postdoc at the Center for Theoretical Physics, received the 2023 J.J. and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics “for exploration of collider signals of physics beyond the Standard Model including the development and assessment of a novel collider event-shape observable tailored for distinguishing strongly coupled hidden sectors from background and studies of physics at future muon accelerators and colliders.” Cesarotti’s research program works toward discovering physics beyond the Standard Model in robust ways. This includes developing novel observables and advancing the physics case for future experiments She is also an active member of the muon collider community Cesarotti completed her BA in physics at Cornell University in 2017 and completed her dissertation in high-energy particle theory under Professor Matthew Reece at Harvard University in 2022 Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Beam Physics Award Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) postdoc Chao Li received the 2023 Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Beam Physics Award “for seminal and highly creative contributions to the development of microfabricated miniature atomic beam technology and the invention of new chip-scale techniques that enable precise and targeted delivery of neutral atoms.” With MIT RLE’s Quantum Photonics and AI Group Li is exploring the use of large-scale photonic integrated circuits for the fast and coherent control of various types of qubits Li earned his bachelor’s degree from Jilin University in 2016 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics Pablo Gaston Debenedetti SM ’81, PhD ’85, an alumnus of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering who is currently the Princeton University dean for research, received the 2023 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics “for seminal contributions to the science of supercooled liquids and glasses Debenedetti’s research interests include supercooled water include providing rigorous computational proof of the existence of a liquid-liquid transition in several water models and demonstrating the relationship between structural order and water’s anomalies Professor Kara is an observational astrophysicist who is a faculty member in the Department of Physics and a member of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI) She uses high-energy transients and time-variable phenomena to understand the physics behind how black holes grow and how they affect their environments Kara has advanced a new technique called X-ray reverberation mapping which allows astronomers to map the gas falling onto black holes and measure the effects of strongly curved spacetime close to the event horizon She also works on a variety of transient phenomena such as tidal disruption events and galactic black hole outbursts She is a NASA Participating Scientist for the XRISM Observatory a joint JAXA/NASA X-ray spectroscopy mission that just launched this past September and is a NASA Participating Scientist for the ULTRASAT Mission an ultraviolet all-sky time domain mission She is also working to develop and launch the next generation of NASA missions as deputy principal investigator of the AXIS Probe Mission “I am delighted for Erin,” says Claude Canizares As one of the leading observational astrophysicists of her generation she has made major advances in our understanding of black holes and their environments She also plays a leadership role in the design of new space missions and a thoughtful mentor of graduate students and postdocs.” “Erin is one of a very rare breed of experimental astrophysicists who have the interest and stamina not only to use observatories built by colleagues before her but also to dive into a leadership role planning and executing new spaceflight missions that will shape the future of her field.” The committee also recognized Kara’s work to create “a stimulating and productive multigenerational research group Her mentorship is thoughtful and intentional guiding and supporting each student or postdoc while giving them the freedom to grow and become self-reliant.” “Erin is the best faculty mentor I have ever had,” says one of her students and able to provide detailed input on projects when needed but also gives the right amount of freedom to her students/postdocs to aid in their development Working with Erin has been one of the best parts of my time at MIT.” Kara received a BA in physics from Barnard College and an MPhil in physics and a PhD in astronomy from the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University She subsequently served as Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow and then Neil Gehrels Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Her recognitions include the American Astronomical Society‘s Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in observational astronomical research,” and the Rossi Prize from the High-Energy Astrophysics Division of the AAS (shared) The award committee lauded Kara’s service in the field and at MIT including her participation with the Physics Graduate Admissions Committee the Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellowship Committee Professor Kara also participates in dinners and meet-and-greets invited by student groups Her participation in public outreach programs includes her talks “Black Hole Echoes and the Music of the Cosmos” at both the Concord Conservatory of Music and an event with MIT School of Science alumni How black holes eat nearby stars” for the MIT Summer Research Program “There is nothing more gratifying than being recognized by your peers and I am so appreciative and touched that my colleagues in physics even thought to nominate me for this award,” says Kara “I also want to express my gratitude to my awesome research group They are what makes this job so fun and so rewarding and I know I wouldn’t be in this position without their hard work The National Academy of Sciences has elected 120 new members and 30 international associates including three MIT professors — Angela Belcher and Ronitt Rubinfeld — in recognition of their achievements in original research Angela Belcher is the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and the head of the Department of Biological Engineering.  She is a biological and materials engineer with expertise in the fields of biomaterials Her primary research focus is evolving new materials for energy She received her BS in creative studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara She earned a PhD in inorganic chemistry at UCSB in 1997 Following her postdoctoral research in electrical engineering at UCSB she joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Chemistry Recognitions include the 2013 $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize; the 2010 Eni Prize for Renewable and Non-conventional Energy; and being named a 2018 National Academy of Engineers Fellow and 2012 American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow Rolling Stone magazine listed her as one of the top 100 people changing the country she began her tenure as head of the Department of Biological Engineering Pablo Jarillo-Herrero the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics investigates the quantum electronic transport and optoelectronics properties of novel two-dimensional materials with special emphasis to their superconducting and topological properties. He is known for his groundbreaking research on twistronics — in 2018 the Jarillo-Herrero group discovered that by rotating two layers of graphene by a “magic angle,” the bilayer material can be turned from a metal into an electrical insulator or even a superconductor A native of Spain, Jarillo-Herrero received his “licenciatura” in physics from the University of Valencia an MSc degree from the University of California at San Diego and his PhD in 2005 from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands he worked at Columbia University as a NanoResearch Initiative Fellow before joining MIT in 2008.  His early career awards include an NSF Career Award (2008) a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship (2009) a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE and a Moore Foundation Experimental Physics in Quantum Systems Investigator Award (2014 and 2019) He has been selected as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics-Web of Science (2017-present) Jarillo-Herrero is the recipient of the APS 2020 Oliver E the 2020 Medal of the Spanish Royal Physics Society the 2021 Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecture and Medal National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery and the 2022 Dan Maydan Prize in Nanoscience Research Ronitt Rubinfeld is the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory’s Theory of Computation group Her research interests include randomized and sublinear time algorithms with a particular focus on what can be understood about data by looking at only a very small portion of it Ronitt received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 and prior to that graduated from the University of Michigan with a BSE in electrical and computer engineering Ronitt held postdoc positions at Princeton University and Hebrew University she joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Cornell University the 1995 Cornell Association for Computer Science Undergraduates Faculty of the Year and a recipient of the Cornell College of Engineering Teaching Award Ronitt was a senior research scientist at NEC Research Laboratories she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Rubinfeld gave an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2006 She has been recognized by MIT with the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising in 2018 She became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2014 for contributions to delegated computation and property testing; and she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 Those elected this year bring the total number of active members to 2,512 and the total number of international members to 517 The National Academy of Sciences is a private nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership and — with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine — provides science and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations LEGO blocks can be manually attached to each other in certain prescribed ways to create complex structures What if we could engineer living LEGO-like structures that can self-replicate and move around and can be programmed to grow and self-assemble into any desired target shape An interdisciplinary research team, led by MIT professor Jörn Dunkel and Ingmar Riedel-Kruse of the University of Arizona has developed an experiment-theory platform that moves one step closer to this goal Using genetically engineered bacteria and mathematical modeling they were able to program bacterial systems to grow into arbitrary two-dimensional target structures.  The Riedel-Kruse lab created a bioengineering toolbox that allows them to control the cell-to-cell adhesion properties of motile bacterial cells Genetically modified bacteria grow certain molecules on their cell walls that act as docking stations for suitable partner cells Only cells that have matching molecules can stick to each other whereas those carrying nonmatching ones slide past each other After seeding a small number of bacteria at different positions on a 2D nutrient surface When two cell populations with matching adhesion molecules collide they form a visible solid interface whose position and shape is determined by the initial seeding positions and cell concentrations.  Using their versatile bioengineering toolbox the researchers wanted to create complex target patterns the team needed to understand: How many different cell types are required to realize arbitrary interface patterns How would the mutual interaction rules have to be designed What are the correct seeding conditions to realize the desired 2D structures Dunkel and his PhD student Dominic Skinner now an NSF-Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University sought to formulate a mathematical model that would allow them to simulate the growth and dynamics of the bacterial swarms and predict the formation of the interface patterns “To do trial-and-error experiments is very expensive and time-consuming,” says Dunkel Dominic developed and implemented a model that could predict the expected outcome in a couple of minutes.” Skinner likens the programmed bacteria to living LEGOs “Ingmar’s lab is creating the biological building blocks and we are generating the manual with our models,” he says “His lab puts the bacteria in the right spots — they swarm and collectively build the desired target shape.” “These unique experimental systems make it possible to explore a number of fundamental biological questions: How many cell types are needed to grow certain patterns How much information needs to be encoded in the DNA to achieve a certain level of structural complexity The good agreement between experiment and model predictions allows us to study these questions using computer simulations at very little cost.” the research suggests promises various direct practical applications in biomaterials design Their research paper “4-bit adhesion logic enables universal multicellular interface patterning” is featured on the cover of Nature we provide proof-of-concept realizations of self-grown elastic sheets and channel structures that can transport liquid droplets to desired places,” Dunkel says “Another application are bio-sensors — basically the bacteria write a human-readable message when they sense a molecule in their environment.” the team plans to grow three-dimensional structures and add additional functionalities to the bacteria such as the ability to produce certain chemicals in desired locations The first author of this work is Honesty Kim; other co-authors are David Glass Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist and author Frank Wilczek, the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT, has been awarded the 2022 Templeton Prize This prize is awarded to individuals whose life’s work embodies a fusion of science and spirituality “He is one of those rare and wonderful individuals who bring together a keen creative intellect and an appreciation for transcendent beauty,” says Heather Templeton Dill president of the John Templeton Foundation he is a natural philosopher who unites a curiosity about the behavior of nature with a playful and profound philosophical mind.”  Wilczek won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1973 discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction Other achievements in physics include proposing a leading explanation for dark matter the invention of axions, and the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics (anyons).  including “A Beautiful Question” (2015) and “The Lightness of Being” (2008) he wrote “Longing for the Harmonies” (1988) Wilczek presents a set of 10 insights drawn from physics and harmonized with artistic and philosophical sources to illuminate characteristics of physical reality He is also a columnist for the Wall Street Journal where he discusses scientific subjects for a broad readership For his contributions to Physics Today and to Nature where he explains topics at the frontiers of physics to wider scientific audiences he received the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society.   “The intent of the Templeton Prize is noble and timely which is to bring attention to the possibility of new approaches to the problems or situations or challenges that people have traditionally accessed through religion and many people still do,” he says in his video statement for the Templeton Prize “The central miracle of physics to me is the fact that by playing with equations and working within the world of mental concepts and manipulations you are actually describing the real world If you were looking for trying to understand what God is by understanding God's work Wilczek joined MIT in 2000 with appointments in the Department of Physics and the Center for Theoretical Physics through its unique atmosphere of scientific engagement with the world and its willingness to accommodate my sometimes unusual explorations has helped me to thrive,” Wilczek says.  Wilczek received a BS at the University of Chicago in 1970 and a PhD in physics at Princeton University in 1974 he was the Chancellor Robert Huttenback Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the first permanent member of the National Science Foundation’s Institute for Theoretical Physics he has been an adjunct professor in the Centro de Estudios Científicos of Valdivia Lee Institute and chief scientist at Wilczek Quantum Center at Shanghai Jiao Tong University; distinguished professor at Arizona State University; and professor at Stockholm University Wilczek has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow (1975–77) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (1982–87) the American Physical Society’s Sakurai Prize the Michelson Prize from Case Western University and the Lorentz Medal of the Netherlands Academy for his contributions to the development of theoretical physics He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a trustee of the University of Chicago there is a spiritual quality to his ideas,” says Templeton Dill “By uncovering a remarkable order in the natural world Wilczek has come to appreciate different ways of thinking about reality he has invited all of us to join him in the quest for understanding.”   Wilczek will participate in several virtual and in-person events including a 2022 Templeton Prize event in the fall where he will deliver a Templeton Prize lecture Wilczek is the sixth Nobel laureate to receive the Templeton Prize since its inception in 1972 and joins a list of 51 prize recipients including St was established by the late global investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton to honor those who harness the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it Students experiencing discrimination and living through the pandemic have something in common: feeling isolated It’s a topic being explored in a paper by senior math and economics major Fiona Chen on remote learning and its effect on academic performance. Chen is using support from the MindHandHeart Innovation Fund and a Peter J. Eloranta Fellowship to perform on a study on how Covid-19 and students’ online activities affect their productivity it’s difficult not to equate social distancing with social isolation and often the loneliness that comes with our new normal,” said one of the students participating in her study to have conversations about the effects of social isolation on our ability to learn from and connect with the people both in and outside of our virtual classrooms.” Chen’s paper also serves as an appropriate capstone of her time at MIT. As an undergraduate, she has found herself straddling two worlds: economics research, and student advocacy, with her work in The Tech, the Undergraduate Association, and MIT Students Against War “The former has provided me the ability to analyze social issues with great precision while the latter has helped me understand the importance of tangible political action,” she says she hopes to build a career to advocate for individuals whose voices have traditionally been ignored or excluded particularly those who have faced economic hardships due to social and political inequalities Chen grew up with her younger sister in Texas and then in California children of Chinese immigrants busy juggling parenthood with work and graduate school Fiona began school in a predominantly white neighborhood and she only spoke Mandarin; frequent moves made it hard to connect with others She began to read political literature that analyzed racial and found a support network of women and students of color who cared deeply about fighting for social justice As she learned more about the “have-not” economy she began volunteering as a debate coach for other schools that “had just a fraction of the financial resources of my own,” she says She came to MIT to study mathematics and economics, inspired by the work of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and professors such as Esther Duflo Chen says she strove to amplify stories and voices of students whose concerns have often been neglected such as students who had been mistreated by principal investigators many of whom were working to improve MIT’s mental health support and reporting channels Chen also co-founded MIT Students Against War to combat MIT’s involvement in military technology research As an active officer with the Undergraduate Association she played a crucial role in the early days of the pandemic She worked with the administration to help move students off campus and to set up remote learning procedures and enhance public health and student life protocols She also used student forums and survey results to help students experiencing poor internet access She pushed for the universal pass/no record grading policy for spring 2020 and to make sure that the enforcement of health regulations wouldn’t create a hostile environment on campus “We saw so many issues just pop up immediately,” she recalls “I helped with trying to think through how we can ensure students on campus stay safe without having to impose overly strict rules or enforcement mechanisms.” she too struggled with the social isolation “There was a several-month period in the beginning where I didn’t see any people in my same age group That was very difficult for me to handle mentally,” she recalls She returned to her Maseeh pod in the fall, and is spending her final spring semester finishing her paper. She recently was  awarded a 2021 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans which she will use to pursue a PhD in economics she admits that “some people might see my profile as being all over the place.” one of the keys to overcoming isolation is to diversify.   “I think the reason why I’m attracted to so many things is that I think everyone has a lot to learn What I care about is understanding a lot of these issues in a larger social context I hope that more people understand that there’s an interconnectedness of things in the world and a futility with staying within individual disciplines.”   Physics Professor Martin Zwierlein has been named one of 10 recipients of the 2019 Class of Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship by the U.S “The award provides me with the unique opportunity to go into truly unchartered territory in the quantum world not driven by deadlines and milestones but we may stumble upon new states of matter with extraordinary properties that we did not even anticipate.” The highly competitive fellowship, formerly known as the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship, aims to advance transformative, university-based fundamental research. It is named in honor of Vannevar Bush PhD 1916 (1890-1974) A scientist and engineer nicknamed “The General of Physics,” he organized and led American science and technology during World War II Bush also served as the director of the U.S Office of Scientific Research and Development and founded a large defense and electronics company Selected by a panel of experts from among more than 250 white papers this year’s awardees will join 55 current fellows conducting DoD-related research in areas that include materials science and applied mathematics.     "The Department of Defense is the home of big ideas for unique problem sets," said Bindu Nair PhD '00, deputy director for basic research in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering "The Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship reflects the department's commitment to support paradigm-shifting research that explores the unknown engages outstanding scientists and engineers on these challenges and helps to define and transform our research agendas of the future." Bonnie Berger the Simons Professor of Mathematics at MIT has been selected as the 2019 recipient of the International Society for Computational Biology Senior Scientist Award The annual award recognizes “highly significant long-term career achievement,” in Berger’s case for visionary and deep contributions to the field. ISCB is the premier society in computational biology and bioinformatics with 3,400 members.  “It’s a tremendous honor to join such a distinguished and accomplished group of scientists,” said Berger who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Berger made fundamental contributions in diverse areas of bioinformatics starting from important contributions in protein structure prediction in 1990s to founding the area of compressive genomics a few years ago,” said her nominator a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California at San Diego Berger will receive the award and give the Senior Scientist keynote at the ISMB/ECCB 2019 meeting this July in Basel Berger was also named an ISCB Fellow in 2012 Record voter turnouts are predicted in the U.S. elections this year, but will they arrive at the polls, or the early-voting ballot box, with informed opinions? And are more-informed voters more likely to vote? That’s a problem that math doctoral candidate Ashwin Narayan decided to work on this semester Narayan described his virtual workplace with a single word that few others working from home can use: exciting “I’ve been interested in politics for quite a while I really felt that I wanted to do something more to be more active and work towards some immediate impact.” are working on more recent data to figure out how the site's tools affect turnout Narayan’s role as an electoral fellow is to manage the interface between the campaigns and organizations and one of the country’s largest elections databases his focus is on the “Make a Plan to Vote” tool which informs voters on how to vote by mail “Questions about mail-in ballots and early voting have been highest on people’s minds,” says Narayan “The database we have compiled now has data about mail-in voting regulations — how to get a ballot and when to return it by, locations for ballot drop boxes and early voting polling locations for nearly every address in the country.” Users can also access information about candidates and ballot questions using a customizable information is aggregated instead of interpreted and candidates are listed in alphabetical order based on what they’ve said in debates as covered in the news While BallotReady doesn’t monetize its voter facing site the CivicEngine platform that Narayan is working on does sell products to drive turnout for its customers.  I find the chance to work with such comprehensive data about elections in the U.S a fascinating opportunity to shed light on how to make voting easier We look at the presence of drop-box locations based on post-election statistics on turnout can draw connections between the number of voters and the policies.” “The mission of BallotReady appealed to me; informing every voter about every aspect of their ballot is such a fundamental tenet of democracy that it should be entirely nonpartisan,” he adds “It was important to me to work not only with a group of data scientists but rather with a group that has deep knowledge about political campaigns who can motivate the key questions to ask with their deep domain knowledge.” His work with BallotReady will extend through December Because BallotReady launched in 2016 on a regional basis and their 2018 expansion nationally was not in an election year Narayan will be helping the company to debrief what information they collected “We are hoping to analyze where our users come from and go through feedback from customers to figure out exactly what they liked about their data and hope for in future elections,” he says to develop statistically motivated algorithms to analyze large biological datasets “I do think I was well-prepared for the work I’m doing now because of my research,” he says “I’ve spent the past four years working with biologists to figure out the right questions to ask to better understand massive and the political world is extremely analogous: It’s not only that the data are noisy and hard to compile but also it’s crucial to work with the experts to figure out the right questions.” The National Academy of Sciences has elected 120 new members and 30 international associates including five professors from MIT — Dan Freedman and Gigliola Staffilani — in recognition of their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” Current membership totals 2,461 active members and 511 international associates Membership is one of the highest honors that a scientist can achieve Daniel Freedman, professor emeritus in MIT’s departments of Mathematics and Physics is also a visiting professor at Stanford University’s Institute for Theoretical Physics Freedman's research is in quantum field theory with an emphasis on the role of supersymmetry one focus of his work is the AdS/CFT correspondence a broad framework based on the equivalence of field theories in different spacetime dimensions He received his BA from Wesleyan University in 1960 and his MS and PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1962 and 1964 Freedman held postdoctoral appointments at Imperial College and Princeton University before joining the faculty at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at SUNY Stony Brook In 1980 he joined the MIT faculty in applied mathematics and has been jointly appointed with the MIT theoretical physics faculty since 2001 Freedman was a distinguished alumni fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was a former Sloan and Guggenheim fellow, and was named Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Physical Society. He has received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics Claude E. Shannon Professor of Mathematics Larry Guth’s research interests are in metric geometry and on finding connections between geometric inequalities and topology. More recently Guth has been researching harmonic analysis and combinatorics an open question in Euclidean geometry that connects with restriction-type estimates in Fourier analysis and with estimates about incidences of lines in extremal combinatorics Guth received his BS in mathematics from Yale University and after receiving his PhD from MIT in 2005 he followed a postdoctoral position at Stanford with faculty appointments at the University of Toronto and the Courant He joined the MIT math faculty in 2012.  Stephen Morris is an economic theorist who has made important contributions to the foundations of game theory and mechanism design He has developed new ways of understanding and modeling the role of incomplete information in the economy and its implications for analysis and policy Morris received his undergraduate degree in mathematics and economics at Cambridge University He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University before joining MIT’s Department of Economics in 2019.  Morris is a fellow and was president of the Econometric Society He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences a research fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research and was a Sloan Research and Guggenheim Fellow Gigliola Staffilani the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Mathematics is a mathematical analyst whose research focuses on dispersive nonlinear partial differential equations She is one of 59 new members who are women the most elected to the NAS in a single year Staffilani received the BS equivalent from the University of Bologna in 1989 and MS and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago in 1991 and 1995 Robert Guy Griffin the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry is also director of the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory He devotes a large fraction of the Griffin Group’s research efforts to develop new magnetic resonance techniques to study molecular structure and dynamics He also develops high-field dynamic nuclear polarization for the study of biological solids Griffin received his BS in 1964 from the University of Arkansas and his PhD from Washington University in 1969 He joined the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory in 1972 and the Department of Chemistry’s faculty in 1989 He was awarded the Richard R. Ernst Prize in Magnetic Resonance sponsored by the Bruker BioSpin Corporation for his pioneering contributions to high-resolution solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance as a whole as well as its applications to biological systems Griffin has developed widely used techniques for dipolar recoupling that permit internuclear distances to be measured during so-called “magic angle” spinning experiments.  He has also received the ISMAR (International Society of Magnetic Resonance) Prize the Günther Laukien Prize for NMR research and the Bijvoet Medal of the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research of Utrecht University For the fourth time in the history of the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition Putnam Fellows include three individuals who ranked in the top five in previous years — sophomores Papon Lapate and Luke Robitaille and junior Brian Liu — plus junior Ankit Bisain and first-year Jiangqi Dai also finished in first place — MIT’s eighth first-place win in the past 10 competitions Teams are based on the three top scorers from each institution The institution with the first-place team receives a $25,000 award received the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize She is the seventh MIT student to receive this honor since the award began in 1992 68 out of the top 100 test-takers who took the exam on Dec MIT students took eight of the next 11 spots (each awarded $1,000) seven of the next 10 after that (each awarded $250) and 48 out of a total of 75 honorable mentions.  The contest also listed 29 MIT students who finished in the 101-200 spots which means a total of 97 of the 200 top Putnam participants — nearly half — were MIT undergraduates There were also 52 MIT students in the 201-500 finishers.  “I am incredibly proud of our students’ amazing effort and performance at the Putnam Competition,” says associate professor of mathematics Yufei Zhao ’10 Zhao is also a three-time Putnam Fellow.    This exam is considered to be the most prestigious university-level mathematics competition in the United States and Canada MIT students filled Walker Memorial in December to take what is notoriously a very difficult exam; while a perfect score is 120 the median score this year was just 10 points But even just coming out to take the six-hour exam was applauded by the Department of Mathematics "Beyond the truly stellar achievements of our undergraduate population it is also amazing to see the participation rate another sign that MIT students love mathematics!" says Professor Michel Goemans “Our performance is historically unprecedented and astonishing,” says MIT Math Community and Outreach Officer Michael King with hundreds of students wrestling intensely with challenging problems whether they made some progress on one problem or completely solved many There are several ways that students can prepare for the grueling test. The Undergraduate Mathematics Association hosts fun Putnam practice events, and Zhao teaches class 18.A34 (Mathematical Problem Solving) which brings together first-year students who are interested in the annual competition also helps new students to form a supportive community.  The math department offers other ways to encourage students to bond over their love of problem-solving “MIT is truly a unique place to be a math major,” says Zhao Half of the top scorers are alumni of another STEM-student magnet, MIT math’s PRIMES (Program for Research in Mathematics Engineering and Science) high school outreach program Three of this year’s Putnam Fellows (Bisain along with many of the students receiving honorable mentions former PRIMES students take a prominent place among Putnam winners,” says Pavel Etingof a math professor who is also PRIMES’s chief research advisor three out of five Putnam Fellows are PRIMES alumni MIT recruits the best mathematical talent in the nation.” the National Academy of Sciences elected 120 new members and 26 international associates including three professors from MIT — Abhijit Banerjee and Roger Summons — recognizing their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” Current membership totals 2,403 active members and 501 international associates nonprofit institution for scientific advancement established in 1863 by congressional charter and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Banerjee’s groundbreaking research focuses on development economics and the alleviation of global poverty work for which he shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences He continues to serve as a director of J-PAL; he is also a past president of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research a Center for Economic and Policy Research research fellow an international research fellow of the Kiel Institute and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society in collaboration with fellow NAS member and MIT Professor Esther Duflo emphasizes the importance of field work in antipoverty initiatives in order to recreate the precision of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and laboratory-style data within the complexity of ever-evolving social realities The resulting RCT evidence reveals which poverty interventions really work and the private sector to plan effective programs and policies for poverty alleviation development economics was considered marginal in economic studies a view that Banerjee’s work and high-profile achievements have helped to correct After beginning her career working in algorithms at MIT Berger was one of the pioneer researchers in the area of computational molecular biology and together with the many students she has mentored has been instrumental in defining the field Her work addresses biological and biomedical questions by using computation in support of or in place of laboratory procedures with a goal being to get more accurate answers at a greatly reduced cost Combining genomic and health-related data from millions of patients will empower unprecedented insights into human health and disease risk Berger transforms and creates techniques from algorithmic thinking to provide novel computational methods and software to enable biomedical data sharing and analysis at scale Berger is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering Recently she was recognized by ISCB with their Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award She received the NIH Margaret Pittman Director's Award and recognition as MIT Technology Review magazine's inaugural TR100 top young innovators head of the steering committee for Research in Computational Molecular Biology and member-at-large of the Section on Mathematics at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) as well as on multiple advisory committees and editorial boards Roger Summons is the Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology in the Department of Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT.   Working at the intersection of biogeochemistry Summons’ work examines the origins and co-evolution of Earth’s early life and the environment beginning with the first geological and geochemical records and microbially dominated ecosystems As an investigator in the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life he’s particularly focused on lipid chemistry of microbes important to understating Earth through deep time organic and isotopic indicators of climate change and biomarkers in sediments and petroleum.  Summons applies findings from this research to understanding life on Earth and the search for it elsewhere in the universe he has served on three committees of the National Research Council: Committee on Origin and Evolution of Life As an emeritus member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) Executive Council and the head of the MIT team of NAI called the Foundations of Complex Life: Evolution Summons helped integrate this research with international science communities his group investigated factors that led to the evolution of complex life by examining processes and conditions that preserve biological signatures Summons has contributed to Mars rover missions Curiosity and Perseverance providing expertise on the preservation of organic matter from different environments on Earth and the red planet a so-called hysteresis loop accompanies such a phase change so that the transition temperatures are different depending on whether the material is cooled down or warmed up In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, a global research team led by MIT physics professor Nuh Gedik discovered an unusual hysteretic transition in a layered compound called EuTe4 where the hysteresis covers a giant temperature range of over 400 kelvins This large thermal span not only breaks the record among crystalline solids but also promises to introduce a new type of transition in materials that possess a layered structure These findings would create a new platform for fundamental research on hysteretic behavior in solids over extreme temperature ranges the many metastable states residing inside the giant hysteresis loop offer ample opportunities for scientists to exquisitely control the electrical property of the material which can find application in next-generation electrical switches or nonvolatile memory a type of computer memory that retains data when powered off.  Researchers include postdoc Baiqing Lyu and graduate student Alfred Zong PhD ’20 from the Gedik lab as well as 26 others from 14 institutions across the globe The experimental works performed in this paper made use of state-of-the-art synchrotron facilities in the United States and China where brilliant light sources are generated by fast-moving charged particles in a kilometer-long circular track and the intense light is focused onto EuTe4 to unveil its internal structure Gedik and his group also collaborated with a team of theorists including Professor Boris Fine and A. V both of whom helped to integrate many pieces of the puzzle in experimental observations into a consistent picture.  Hysteresis is a phenomenon where the response of a material to a perturbation A hysteresis indicates that the system is trapped in some local but not global minimum in the energy landscape In crystalline solids characterized by long-range order where there is a periodic pattern of an atomic arrangement over the entire crystal hysteresis typically occurs over a fairly narrow temperature range from a few to tens of kelvins in most cases we instead found an extremely wide temperature range for the hysteresis over 400 kelvins,” says Lyu as this value is limited by the capabilities of current experimental techniques This finding immediately caught our attention and our combined experimental and theoretical characterization of EuTe4 challenges conventional wisdom on the type of hysteretic transitions that can occur in crystals.” One manifestation of the hysteretic behavior is in the electrical resistance of the material By cooling down or warming up crystals of EuTe4 the researchers were able to vary their electrical resistivity by orders of magnitude “The value of resistivity at a given temperature depends on whether the crystal used to be colder or hotter,” explains Zong “This observation indicates to us that the electrical property of the material somehow has a memory of its thermal history and microscopically the properties of the material can retain the traits from a different temperature in the past Such ‘thermal memory’ may be used as a permanent temperature recorder by measuring the electrical resistance of EuTe4 at room temperature we immediately know what is the coldest or the hottest temperature the material has experienced in the past.” The researchers also found several oddities in the hysteresis unlike other phase transitions in crystals they did not observe any modification in the electronic or lattice structure across the large temperature range “The absence of microscopic change looks really peculiar to us,” adds Lyu unlike other hysteretic transitions that sensitively depend on the rate of cooling or warming the hysteresis loop of EuTe4  appears unaffected by this factor.” One clue to the researchers is the way electrons are arranged in EuTe4 electrons in a EuTe4 crystal spontaneously condense into regions with low and high densities forming a secondary electronic crystal on top of the original periodic lattice,” explains Zong “We believe the oddities associated with the giant hysteresis loop may be related to this secondary electronic crystal where different layers of this compound exhibit disordered movement while establishing the long-range periodicity.”   “The layered nature of EuTe4 is crucial in this explanation of the hysteresis,” says Lyu.“The weak interaction between the secondary crystals in different layers enables them to move relative to each other hence creating many metastable configurations in the hysteresis loop.” to induce these metastable states in EuTe4 This will enable scientists to manipulate its electrical properties in technologically useful ways.  “We can produce intense laser pulses shorter than one-millionth of one-millionth of a second,” says Gedik “The next goal is to trick EuTe4 into a different resistive state after shining a single flash of light making it an ultrafast electrical switch that can be used other authors of the paper are associated with Stanford University Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Shanghai Advanced Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology This research was supported primarily by the U.S Additional support for the MIT researchers was provided by the U.S and the Miller Institute; other co-authors were supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Key Research and Development Program of China As the MIT community moved to remote learning in response to the Covid-19 pandemic a math outreach program was moving online — and developing a project to allow high schoolers to help research the disease Engineering and Science (PRIMES) pairs high school students with MIT graduate students and postdocs to investigate unsolved problems in mathematics This year, one of those unsolved problems is Covid-19. MIT mathematics doctoral candidate Younhun Kim has already signed up to mentor two high school juniors as they research mathematical modeling of SARS-CoV-2 host protein interactions "This was a late addition to our program," says PRIMES director and Department of Mathematics Lecturer Slava Gerovitch "As we were moving our PRIMES program online to promote social distancing we also decided to view the pandemic as an intellectual challenge We hope that this project may contribute valuable Covid-19 research." This project and others will culminate in a presentation at the PRIMES conference in October and a submitted publication in December.  for rigorous summer programs for mathematically talented youth Conceived by Gerovitch and mathematics Professor Pavel Etingof in 2010 MIT PRIMES is a free outreach program for high school students with a particular focus on increasing the representation of women and under-served minorities in mathematics research The program’s goal is “to allow students to discover the beauty of being a research mathematician,” according to Etingof.      With seed money from the mathematics department the program initially sought out local students to spend an entire year to create mathematical and computer models that address real-world problems “We were initially afraid that we wouldn’t get enough applications for the 10 slots,” says Gerovitch and we decided to double the initial size of the program.” What started out as an experiment with just 21 local participants grew more than fivefold in 10 years over 600 students have participated in the various MIT PRIMES and MathROOTS programs and more than 130 PRIMES alumni have matriculated at MIT the PRIMES initiative has expanded into sub-programs that target different student audiences Each is designed to build collaborative teams with mathematics members to promote partnership and wider outreach in the mathematical sciences community "It is very gratifying that our outreach efforts are recognized by AMS," says Michel Goemans "It is an important part of our educational activities which not only gets young students interested in mathematics but is also an enriching experience for our many graduate student mentors." a guided math reading program at the University of Geneva and ETH in Zürich After the success of these programs, the MIT mathematics department launched MathROOTS in 2015 an outreach initiative to encourage diversity at the high school level This free annual two-week math summer camp aims to engage its 20 U.S.-based participants in creative problem-solving expose them to beautiful yet accessible mathematics and immerse them in an academic and cross-cultural community of scholars Participants also attend fun group activities “MathROOTS has proven remarkably successful not only in empowering students to take on more challenging and engaging mathematics but also drawing many to more seriously consider applying to MIT and other top schools,” says Etingof “This is at the crux of what diversity outreach is all about.” MathROOTS is adapting to the realities of social distancing by transitioning online Students will meet their peers and mentors via Zoom but the program will not lose its fun and engaging spirit and extensive social programming will complement online math lectures and problem-solving sessions “The entire PRIMES program is run remotely now and the projects are moving forward at full speed,” he says.     "There is something special about having mentors who are excited to teach and a group of people who want to share the 'Aha!' moments of clarity and understanding with each other," says former PRIMES Circle student Makena Binker Cosen "My experience in MIT PRIMES Circle has allowed me to appreciate mathematics from a new perspective and become fascinated by how beautifully simple a complex idea can become." —Excerpt from Miriam Manglani’s poem “Makinde’s Quantum World,” about Makinde Ogunnaike’s quantum physics research who studied neuroscience with the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and who tapped into his photography and writing talents to co-produce the art exhibit.  A Nigerian-American native of Delaware, Ogunnaike studied physics and math at Harvard University, and received a master’s in philosophy of physics at Oxford University before coming to MIT to study condensed-matter physics theory. He is a graduate student working with Professor Leonid Levitov’s group studying emergent bound states in mixed Bose-Fermi systems and entanglement dynamics “I deal with systems where quantum theory’s strangeness manifests in emergent properties I look for materials with unintuitive properties that arise from a chorus of delicate quantum connections One line of work involves studying collections of cold atoms that bind together to form ‘composite atoms’ themselves Another focuses on the effects of measurement and symmetry on the spread of quantum entanglement — correlations between quantum particles.” Working with poet Miriam Manglani to explain his research Ogunnaike decided to focus on the areas where his research and his faith intersected as he also runs a poetry and tea event at Harvard “We get a lot of STEM students bringing in their own perspectives and interests feels like it comes from the same place as my interest in physics: interest in understanding fundamental structures since these usually have extra meaning as a way of knowing or interacting with the divine.” He is a co-founder of the Harvard-MIT Chapter of the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP) and a founding member of the MIT Physics Working Group to promote changes in diversity and inclusion to the department His career goals are to teach physics at a liberal arts college “where I can teach philosophy of physics and support underrepresented students.”     This project is a collaboration with The People’s HeART, a joint community health-care initiative led by physics alumnus Daniel Chonde '07, PhD '15, who is also featured in the exhibit After Chonde studied particle physics at MIT he received his PhD in biophysics from Harvard with a joint degree from MIT in medical engineering and medical physics After Harvard Medical school he became a resident in the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital The Poetry of Science will be featured in the lobby of Mass General through the end of November, and at an exhibition at the Rotch Library at MIT during Independent Activities Period in January 2022. The poems were presented at the Boston Lit Crawl on June 10 at the Starlight Space in Central Square, and will be published in Spry Literary Journal Graduate student Olumakinde “Makinde” Ogunnaike and Josh Sariñana PhD ’11 join Boston Public Radio to discuss The Poetry of Science an initiative that brought together artists and scientists of color to help translate complex scientific research through art and poetry “Science is often a very difficult thing to penetrate,” says Sariñana “I thought poetry would be a great way to translate the really abstract concepts into more of an emotional complexity of who the scientists actually are.” Members of the Department of Mathematics community — including faculty, students, and alumni — were recognized for their achievements at the recent 2023 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston Professor Tom Mrowka and his Harvard University collaborator Peter Kronheimer received the 2023 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research, awarded by the American Mathematical Society (AMS), for their joint paper “Gauge Theory for Embedded Surfaces.” Professor Scott Sheffield and former MIT postdoc and instructor Jason P. Miller, now at the University of Cambridge, have been awarded the AMS’ 2023 Leonard Eisenbud Prize in Mathematics and Physics. They earned this award “for their monumental series of papers on Liouville Quantum Gravity.” CLE Moore instructor Jia Shi received the Association for Women in Mathematics’ Dissertation Prize for her thesis that “proves major results on two separate topics in fluid mechanics The association also honored two MIT seniors who were nominees for the Alice T. Schafer Prize for excellence in mathematics by an undergraduate woman: Anqi Li was the 2023 runner-up and Ilani Axelrod-Freed earned an honorable mention Letong Carina Hong ’22, currently at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar for China, received the 2023 AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student for proving a number of results and solving conjectures in combinatorics, number theory There’s no doubt that in order to study physics But another essential skill that may not be so obvious is the ability to craft a great research proposal Early in her career, Lindley Winslow, the Jerrold R. Zacharias Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT, received mentorship that was crucial to her career path. She is now paying it forward with the launch of a physics research fellowship program to help undergrads especially within a particularly underrepresented group: female physicists Winslow’s pilot program not only offers money for research but also builds in a workshop on preparing research proposals “The program is more than just how to write a proposal,” said Winslow “It is designing a self-contained research project and then writing the supporting research proposal Winslow says while the program is open to all, it is aimed at women because at MIT alone, women make up only 22 percent of physics students, and 15 percent of physics faculty, if you include adjuncts and secondary appointments. In the hopes of increasing these numbers, Winslow received a $75,000 grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation to fund a program aimed at helping women in physics The heart of the program is to provide support on the research grant process with guidelines of $5,000 for undergraduate projects Funds are expected to be used for non-stipend expenses including equipment and travel for collaboration and scientific meetings The proposals will be peer-reviewed in the National Science Foundation style with Winslow acting as the program manager Winslow received 16 fellowship applications by the May deadline The first round of fellows selected are Clara Sousa-Silva who is working on "Creating a Rosetta Stone for the Interpretation of Exoplanet Biospheres" with mentor Professor Sara Seager; Shuo Zhang for her project "Probing MeV-GeV Cosmic-ray Particles in the Galactic Center," with Professor Kerstin Perez; Carina Belvin "Investigating Nonequilibrium Magnetization Dynamics Using Ultrafast Terahertz Spectroscopy," under Professor Nuh Gedik; and Radha Mastandrea for her project "Analyzing CMS Open Collider Data Though Machine Learning," with Professor Jesse Thaler The second round of proposals are due Dec. 7 an experimental nuclear physicist whose primary focus is on neutrinoless double-beta decay modeled the fellowship on the 2010 $60,000 L’Oreal for Women in Science Fellowship that she earned while an MIT postdoc “I have been very lucky that I have had very strong mentoring which I credit to my current success: My thesis advisor who used the classical approach of having us contribute to the writing of the group grant who proofread my NSF CAREER proposal and told me I needed to make sure the big picture was front and center.” It was her postdoc advisor, Professor Janet Conrad who mentored Winslow on how to create a good proposal “She took a very detailed approach of breaking down what is a good proposal how to work with your program manager to tailor the budget and subject and finally to deliver something that will be reviewed well by your peers,” said Winslow “She was responsible for me applying to the L’Oreal and helped me re-write and edit that proposal (and a couple others since then).” Winslow never forgot the importance of mentorship. In 2016, she was among a dozen leading scholars in physics and astronomy at a Heising-Simons Foundation summit that discussed academic and career pathways for women in these fields. She was also on the workshop committee for a separate Heising-Simons initiative at April’s Rising Stars in Physics Workshop for women interested in navigating the early stages of academic careers in physics and astronomy Winslow surveyed Women in Physics group members and discovered that few students knew much about the grant proposal process “It was striking how confident they were that they could execute a research plan but how that confidence disappeared when I asked about their ability to come up with ideas and actually prepare the proposal,” Winslow recalled workshops trained applicants on how to put their best foot forward “This program aims to “pull back the curtain” and teach our students and postdocs how that part of the system works,” says Winslow “The process of structuring projects and writing grants to support them is one of the most intimidating aspects of the academic path It’s these sorts of tasks — qualifying exams job applications — that end up affecting women more due to a combination of confidence Confidence in your ability to get grants is integral to wanting to stay in the field and the numbers (of women physicists) are so low that we cannot afford to lose anyone.” When an introductory computational science class was repurposed to study the Covid-19 pandemic this spring the instructors saw student registration rise from 20 students to nearly 300 They very quickly were able to fast-track the curriculum to focus on applications to Covid-19 responses; students were equally fast in jumping on board “Everyone at MIT wants to contribute,” says Edelman. “While we at the Julia Lab are doing research in building tools for scientists Dave and I thought it would be valuable to teach the students about some of the fundamentals related to computation for drug development The course is offered through MIT’s Department of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Mathematics. “This course opens a trove of opportunities to use computation to better understand and contain the Covid-19 pandemic,” says MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Director Daniela Rus The fall version of the class had a maximum enrollment of 20 students but the spring class has ballooned to nearly 300 students in one weekend “We’ve had a tremendous response,” Edelman says. “This definitely stressed the MIT sign-up systems in ways that I could not have imagined.” majoring in computer science and linguistics says she was initially drawn to the class to learn Julia “but also to develop the skills to do further computational modeling and conduct research on the spread and possible control of Covid-19.” "There's been a lot of misinformation about the epidemiology and statistical modeling of the coronavirus,” adds sophomore Raj Movva “I think this class will help clarify some details and give us a taste of how one might actually make predictions about the course of a pandemic."  Edelman says that he has always dreamed of an interdisciplinary modern class that would combine the machine learning and AI of a “data-driven” world the modern software and systems possibilities that Julia allows and  scientific machine learning of the “physical world.”  He calls this class “a natural outgrowth of Julia Lab's research and that of the general cooperative open-source Julia community.” For years this online community collaborates to create tools to speed up the drug approval process aid in scientific machine learning and differential equations and predict infectious disease transmission following the great MIT tradition of MIT open courses,” says Edelman So when MIT turned to virtual learning to de-densify campus remotely taught version of the class was not too difficult for Edelman and Sanders "Even though we have run open remote learning courses before it's never the same as being able to see the live audience in front of you,” says Edelman. “However MIT students ask such great questions in the Zoom chat so that it remains as intellectually invigorating as ever." Sanders, a Marcos Moshinsky research fellow currently on leave as a professor at the National University of Mexico, is working on techniques for accelerating global optimization. Involved with the Julia Lab since 2014, Sanders has worked with Edelman on various teaching, research, and outreach projects related to Julia, and his YouTube tutorials have reached over 100,000 views “His videos have often been referred to as the best way to learn the Julia language,” says Edelman Edelman will also be enlisting some help from Philip his family’s Corgi who until recently had been a frequent wanderer of MIT’s halls and classrooms “Philip is a well-known Julia expert whose image has been classified many times by Julia’s AI Systems,” says Edelman “Students are always happy when Philip participates in the online classes.” Like many European countries, France takes its soccer — or football — very seriously. To further refine the game of top players, a French startup called Footbar created a smart device to measure players’ stats such as speed The artificial intelligence used by the Meteor tracker determines the quality of passes and tackles based only on the acceleration of the tracker worn on the player’s calf the AI was unable to tell whether some athletes “cheated” by wearing the tracker on their ankles which provided better statistics than when wearing it on their calves they sought out an intern at MIT.   When math and computer science junior Benton Wilson applied and was accepted for an internship through MIT-France part of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) he had only a few expectations: to do something data science-related and “to gain some perspective for my worldview.”  He joined four French interns at Footbar he was "un peu nerveux" about using his French skills in a professional setting but his high school soccer skills came in handy when he tried out the quarter-sized device himself His first task was to create algorithms that would determine where a player was wearing the tracker Players can upload their stats to their computer and compare their results online against teammates as well as Meteor-wearing clients all over the world and then you can also make a profile and see how you change over time,” explains Wilson But results are skewed depending on where players wear the tracker Footbar decided that Wilson needed to develop an algorithm that would “penalize” the ankle-wearing players “It is a pretty complicated task for someone discovering the data,” says Wilson’s supervisor at Footbar “His first weeks were probably a bit complicated for him as he both had to get more familiar with both our stack (understand how our code works) and with the type of data we work with (time-series data from an accelerator).” Wilson used his background in machine learning and Python the database system Django, and signal processing he discovered some technical solutions that further impressed his supervisor “After showing him a few examples, Benton was able to build a model and train it on enough data to make it work well,” says Benoit He says that Wilson’s model was 95 percent accurate and is now being used by Footbar’s production department “We can now successfully detect the smart guys who intentionally exploited this flaw Benoit was impressed enough to let Wilson work independently which led to him spending his final two weeks of his internship solving a second problem that had vexed Footbar: to automatically detect which of four fitness tests was taken by an athlete: sprint; sprint down and back; running endurance test; and vertical jump test such as detecting when jumps tests occur versus other kicks/jumps but overall I just worked on trying different things,” Wilson says.     “This task [was] probably twice as difficult as the previous one but Benton completed this quite well and pretty quickly,” Benoit says.  Wilson added that he appreciated working within a tight-knit community that began each day with standup meetings Wilson shared an apartment with a fellow MIT-France intern who was researching environmental sustainability for another company watched old movies at the Latin Quarter’s Le Champo theater traveled to Barcelona and the Netherlands, and people-watched along the Seine River.  “My favorite areas were over near the Canal de St where there are a ton of restaurants and places to sit along the canals,” he recalls He was one of 45 MIT students who participated in MISTI’s MIT-France this past summer Its internship program, founded in 2001 with a collaboration between the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and MIT, provides opportunities for research and experience in French companies and labs While the logistics of studying abroad can be daunting for many students, Wilson and his peers received a lot of help. MISTI programs cover basic needs, including airfare, housing, and food; Wilson and several others were also co-sponsored by the MIT European Club students receive support with their visas and other paperwork MIT-France provides a comprehensive 377-page student guidebook to living in France Student internships are between three to six months; Wilson stayed for three “MISTI has provided me with a unique opportunity to immerse myself in a totally new environment,” says Wilson, who adds that his experience gave him the confidence to consider an international career after graduation The deadline for next summer's internships is Dec. 1 for priority applicants. To apply, please visit mitfrance.com.  When Obiageli “Oby” Nwodoh arrived at MIT, she already felt at home. A native of Bedford, Massachusetts, she was the daughter of Thomas Nwodoh, a former MIT Media Lab researcher; her first physics teacher at Bedford High was an MIT alum, Joe Zahka; and she had participated in the Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science (MITES) program “I fell in love with physics because it touched reality,” says Nwodoh “I had a way of explaining the world in numbers when words were challenging It was learning a new language and using it to describe the world.” But her interests began to drift toward economic justice she slowly began to understand the economic inequality her family had always experienced she later learned her family benefited from certain antipoverty initiatives The final click for her was during an internship with a defense contractor which didn’t match with her political views She wanted to take her career in a more people-focused direction she enrolled in classes and extracurricular activities that stoked her interests in social justice That’s when dawned on this physics student that she wanted to be a lawyer And she was surprised at how well the two disparate fields complemented each other “The law requires the critical thinking offered by physics," she says there is always the need to observe global issues The law was an outlet to solving major world issues that I experienced as a child Nwodoh worked for several summers with Greater Boston Legal Services’ low-income tax clinic “It was meaningful because I was solving so many issues my own single mother faced,” she says her work was helping with pandemic stimulus checks “What really opened up my eyes was how the pandemic affected low-income populations,” she says but I didn’t hear enough about people who didn’t receive the checks including immigrants and many people receiving federal assistance through welfare There were a lot of forgotten people in the pandemic My work at GBLS solidified my interest in the law and how much impact it could have.”  As a host for the Division of Student Life's podcast “MIT Is…” Nwodoh and her co-host Gabe Owens ’21 explored everything from MIT student life to global issues She turned some of her research projects into podcasts about immigration and another podcast turned into a research project where she examined how tax credits could be distributed in the state of New York to maximize payout “I have dreams of starting my own show one day,” she says.  Nwodoh later worked with the Harvard College Black Pre-Law Association, before helping launch the MIT Pre-Law Society to connect students with relevant career opportunities, classes, and resources. She also was active with the National Society of Black Engineers, and was a peer career advisor at MIT’s Career Advising and Professional Development office Being able to hype a student up and reassure them of their capabilities always filled me with joy,” she says Her physics education continued to play a role in her legal work and steered various projects as a virtual racial justice data analyst intern with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund “I saw how there was a plethora of data in the world but not as many people who knew how to use it it inspired me to learn more about data analytics and how it could be useful in the law After graduating this spring with a major in physics and a minor in political science she became a program paralegal at Ropes and Gray in Chicago such as the impact that algorithm bias has on vulnerable populations “I have cherished how being a physicist has prepared me to not be a physicist," she says "Physics taught me the importance of problem-solving which could be applied in other areas of my life and interests The technical skills could be used to ‘hack’ different parts of my world Physics and the law come down to the same thing: interacting with the world in a profound way MIT taught me that there is always space for my skills in every nook and cranny of the world’s biggest questions I feel like my work as a physicist has prepared me to delve deeper into any issue and holds me to an ethical standard of doing so.” The MIT math dynasty continues to break records for its performance in the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition MIT students corralled all five of the top Putnam Fellow spots won the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize for the top-scoring woman a striking 70 out of this year’s top 100 test-takers were MIT students This year's Putnam Fellows are first-years Papon Lapate and Luke Robitaille Zhu has placed as a fellow every year that he has competed in the exam The 2022 Putnam Team from MIT is (in alphabetical order) Deng Teams are composed of the three top scorers from each participating institution This is the MIT team’s seventh first-place win in the past nine competitions The MIT Department of Mathematics is awarded $25,000 for being the top team and each team member is awarded $1,000.  She is the sixth MIT student to receive this honor since the award began in 1992 MIT students also dominated the rest of the scoreboard: nine of the next 11 (each awarded $1,000) seven of the next nine (each awarded $250) and 49 of the 75 honorable mention rankings.  “Our students' outstanding performance on the Putnam is a testament to their dedication and hard work,” says Yufei Zhao, associate professor of mathematics, who prepares a group of first-year students for the competition through his Putnam Seminar “The results of the Putnam are a source of pride for our institution and a reflection of the exceptional talent of our students.” which consists of 12 problems worth 10 points each but the average score was approximately 8.2; the median score was one.  “For all those who did not perform as they hoped, please remember Pierre de Coubertin's quote: ‘The most important thing is not winning but taking part!,’” says math department head Michel Goemans A full list of the rankings and names of the students can be found on the Putnam website About half of the top scorers are alumni of the MIT Math PRIMES (Program for Research in Mathematics I see familiar names of former PRIMES students among Putnam winners,” says Pavel Etingof a math professor who is also PRIMES’ chief research advisor PRIMES truly serves as a pipeline of mathematical talent for MIT!” only eight students have become Putnam Fellows all four years that they've participated including three from MIT and a Harvard student who is now a math professor at MIT Only 24 other students in the contest's history are three-time Putnam Fellows; Zhu joins six other former MIT students due to the pandemic’s pause on the 2020 competition.) Other MIT math professors who were Putnam Fellows include Davesh Maulik, Peter Shor, and David Vogan PhD ’76. One of the contributors to the competition’s problems included former Putnam coach and MIT math emeritus professor Richard Stanley MIT’s 2019 top scorers made Putnam history when all five Putnam Fellows were from one institution for the first time The competition was founded in 1927 by Elizabeth Lowell Putnam in memory of her husband William Lowell Putnam and has been offered annually since 1938 “No matter how well a student performs in the competition the experience of engaging intensely with challenging problems develops the student's mathematical power and creativity,” says Putnam Mathematical Competition Director Daniel Ullman Adds MAA Executive Director Michael Pearson “The future of mathematics is bright because of these students and we look forward to their continued success.” Shardul Chiplunkar, a senior in Course 18C (mathematics with computer science), entered MIT interested in computers, but soon he was trying everything from spinning fire to building firewalls. He dabbled in audio engineering and glass blowing, was a tenor for the MIT/Wellesley Toons a capella group I thought I was just going to be interested in math and computer science “Now what I appreciate the most is the diversity of people and ideas." his focus is on the interface between people and programming But his extracurriculars have helped him figure out his secondary goal to be a sort of translator between the technical world and the professional users of software “I want to create better conceptual frameworks for explaining and understanding complex software systems and to develop better tools and methodologies for large-scale professional software development through fundamental research in the theory of programming languages and human-computer interaction,” he says It’s a role he was practically born to play Raised in Silicon Valley just as the dot-com bubble was at its peak for his father's job as a networking software engineer he was active in math and coding competitions and a friend introduced him to linguistic puzzles which he recalls “were kind of like math.” He went on to excel in the Linguistics Olympiad where secondary school students solve problems based on the scientific study of languages — linguistics Chiplunkar came to MIT to study what he calls “the perfect major,” course 18C But as the child of a tech dad and a translator mom it was perhaps inevitable that Chiplunkar would figure out how to combine the two subjects into a unique career trajectory While he was a natural at human languages, it was a Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory  Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program that cemented his interest in researching programming languages. Under Professor Adam Chlipala he developed a specification language for internet firewalls and a formally verified compiler to convert such specifications into executable code using correct-by-construction software synthesis and proof techniques “Suppose you want to block a certain website,” explains Chiplunkar “You open up your firewall and enter the address of the website You have some parameters in a made-up language that tells the firewall what code to run But how do you know the firewall will translate that language into code without any mistakes I was trying to create a language to mathematically specify the behavior of firewalls and to convert it into code and prove that the code will do what you want it to do The software would come with a mathematically proven guarantee.” He has also explored adjacent interests in probabilistic programming languages and program inference through cognitive science research, working under Professor Tobias Gerstenberg at Stanford University and later under Joshua Rule in the Tenenbaum lab in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences “But in probabilistic programming languages you might have a random variable whose average value is five but every time you run the program it's somewhere between zero and 10 It turns out you can compute with these probabilities too — and it's a more powerful way to produce a computer model of some aspects of human cognition The language lets you express concepts that you couldn't express otherwise." “A lot of the reasons I like computational cognitive science are the same reasons I like programming and human language,” he explains “Human cognition can often be expressed in a representation that is like a programming language We have no idea what actually happens in the brain but the hypothesis is that at some level of abstraction it's a good model of how cognition works.” Chiplunkar also hopes to bring an improved understanding of modern software systems into the public sphere to empower tech-curious communities such as lawyers he’s taken courses at MIT on internet policy and copyright law and avidly follows the work of digital rights and liberties activists He believes that programmers need fundamentally new language and concepts to talk about the architecture of computer systems for broader societal purposes “I want us to be able to explain why a surgeon should trust a robotic surgery assistant or how a law about data storage needs to be updated for modern systems," he says "I think that creating better conceptual languages for complex software is just as important as creating better practical tools Because complex software is now so important in the world I want the computing industry — and myself — to be better able to engage with a wider audience.” partial differential equations (PDEs) are used to model complex physical processes to generate insight into how some of the most complicated physical and natural systems in the world function researchers use high-fidelity numerical solvers which can be very time-consuming and computationally expensive to run compute the goal property of a solution to PDEs rather than the whole solution Those are trained on a set of data that has been generated by the high-fidelity solver to predict the output of the PDEs for new inputs This is data-intensive and expensive because complex physical systems require a large number of simulations to generate enough data.  In a new paper, “Physics-enhanced deep surrogates for partial differential equations,” published in December in Nature Machine Intelligence a new method is proposed for developing data-driven surrogate models for complex physical systems in such fields as mechanics a former MIT postdoc who is now at Georgia Tech The authors call their method "physics-enhanced deep surrogate" (PEDS) explainable physics simulator with a neural network generator The neural network generator is trained end-to-end to match the output of the high-fidelity numerical solver “My aspiration is to replace the inefficient process of trial and error with systematic computer-aided simulation and optimization,” says Pestourie “Recent breakthroughs in AI like the large language model of ChatGPT rely on hundreds of billions of parameters and require vast amounts of resources to train and evaluate PEDS is affordable to all because it is incredibly efficient in computing resources and has a very low barrier in terms of infrastructure needed to use it.” In the article, they show that PEDS surrogates can be up to three times more accurate than an ensemble of feedforward neural networks with limited data (approximately 1,000 training points), and reduce the training data needed by at least a factor of 100 to achieve a target error of 5 percent. Developed using the MIT-designed Julia programming language this scientific machine-learning method is thus efficient in both computing and data The authors also report that PEDS provides a general data-driven strategy to bridge the gap between a vast array of simplified physical models with corresponding brute-force numerical solvers modeling complex systems the trend of scientific models has been to increase the number of parameters to fit the data better sometimes at the cost of a lower predictive accuracy PEDS does the opposite by choosing its parameters smartly It leverages the technology of automatic differentiation to train a neural network that makes a model with few parameters accurate.” “The main challenge that prevents surrogate models from being used more widely in engineering is the curse of dimensionality — the fact that the needed data to train a model increases exponentially with the number of model variables,” says Pestourie “PEDS reduces this curse by incorporating information from the data and from the field knowledge in the form of a low-fidelity model solver.” The researchers say that PEDS has the potential to revive a whole body of the pre-2000 literature dedicated to minimal models — intuitive models that PEDS could make more accurate while also being predictive for surrogate model applications "The application of the PEDS framework is beyond what we showed in this study,” says Das “Complex physical systems governed by PDEs are ubiquitous from climate modeling to seismic modeling and beyond Our physics-inspired fast and explainable surrogate models will be of great use in those applications and play a complementary role to other emerging techniques The research was supported by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the U.S Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.  Sophomore math major Xzavier Herbert was never much into science fiction or the space program but his skills in pure mathematics seem to keep drawing him into NASA’s orbit With an interest in representation the­ory Herbert spent the summer virtually at NASA studying con­nections between clas­sical information theory and quantum informa­tion theory each of which cor­responds to a different set of laws: classical physics and quantum mechanics “What I’m doing in­volves how represen­tation theory allows us to draw a direct analog from classical informa­tion theory to quantum information theory,” Herbert says “It turns out that there is a mathematical way of justifying how these are related.”  Herbert worked remotely this summer as part of a team of PhD students working to better understand human intelligence and to advance machine learning applications during his internship at the Space Communications and Navigation Internship Project at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt he was able to conduct research on quantum information theory and quantum complexity theory analyzed powerful space communication systems and communicated his findings in a final presentation to NASA management.  It wasn’t his first time working with NASA Herbert discovered his love of math in eighth grade when he outgrew his school’s math classes and began teaching himself new math concepts he asked his teacher whether it was possible to have an exponent with fractions but I’d have to remind myself how it worked.’” Instead where he also explored algebra and trigonometry he took math classes at the local community college where he was mentored by Professor Griff Elder “Math kind of flowed for me,” Herbert recalls But he had never given much thought to space exploration until he learned of a fellowship with NASA in his junior year of high school and the following year was a NASA Nebraska Space Grant Fellow 2018-19 The opportunity gave him a chance to flex his math skills as did his 11th-grade participation in the Haddix STEM Corridor summer research program where he researched the Navier-Stokes Equation and the Magneto-Hydrodynamic Equation under the guidance of a Creighton University math professor “The other schools looked like a resort.” He said he fit right into campus life last fall and continued his work as a math tutor and worked as an assistant sports statistician for MIT sports When the pandemic sent him home to Omaha in March he looked for a summer project that would focus on pure mathematics That’s when a friend of his told him about a NASA internship “I was surrounded by outstanding people who were all working together to achieve a common goal Everyone that I encountered was incredibly passionate about what they did and I was inspired by how hard everyone worked for achieving a better understanding of space exploration.” “Applications of Representation Theory to Quantum Information Theory,” which he worked on with his mentor Alan Hylton he says he worked on “understanding the core ideas behind quantum information theory and understanding how representations of the symmetric and general linear groups could be used to derive alternate proofs of ideas such as Schumacher’s noiseless encoding theorem and other quantum information theoretic analogues to classical information theoretic ideas.” “Xzavier worked extremely hard to successfully complete his summer internship while adapting to a virtual work environment,” says Molly Kearns a spokesperson for the NASA internship program “While Xzavier’s specific position was designed for graduate-level mathematics students he far surpassed the needed qualifications in terms of mathematics maturity The experience gave him the idea that he could combine his interest in quantum information theory with a possible future in space communication systems and wouldn’t rule out a career at the space agency someday he’s concentrating on the relationship between representation theory and quantum information theory “I hope to begin some work on quantum error correction and/or further understand how representation theory can be used to derive other analogues from classical information theory,” he says “The elegance of pure math is what led me to study it I am not really a big fan of problems that have correct solutions I don’t find that correct solution on the first attempt Even though many do not find a valid way of proving a proposition or theorem on the first attempt there really is no right way to prove something and that is what I like the most about pure math.” Each December, thousands of undergraduates participate in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition the premier math contest in the United States and Canada MIT students also dominated the rest of the scoreboard: nine of the next 11 and 33 of the following 80 honorable mention rankings and Zhu — two earned a nearly perfect score and one (who prefers not to be named) earned a perfect score of 120 points This is only the fifth time in Putnam's history that a test-taker received a perfect score Competitors were also ranked by participating institution the ranking is based on the three top scorers from each institution (while in previous years it was based on the scores of three preselected individuals) MIT came in first as a team since the three top scorers This is the MIT team’s fifth first-place win in the past seven years Harvard University came in second and Stanford University came in third The Department of Mathematics will also honor two top-scoring female students at an awards dinner that will be held in the spring Qi was one of three recipients for the 2019 Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize She is the fourth MIT student to receive this honor since the award began in 1992.  The institution with the first-place team receives $25,000 and each member of the team receives $1,000 the next 11 highest-ranking individuals each receive $1,000 and the next 12 highest-ranking individuals each receive $250 The Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize carries a $1,000 award and the Department of Mathematics will also give a $1,000 special prize to Dain Kim “This was unprecedented,” says Yufei Zhao Class of 1956 Career Development Assistant Professor of Mathematics who coaches first-year students for the competitions via the Putnam Seminar in the fall I am extremely proud of our students’ phenomenal performance at the Putnam Competition We are very happy to see that our undergraduate community is home to such an exceptional group of students.” The Department of Mathematics’ PRIMES program which attracts many top high school math-inclined students to its STEM classes also boasted of many alumni among the top scorers and three Harvard students — including a "next-12" finisher and an Elizabeth Lowell Putnam co-winner Laura Pierson Many MIT Putnam competitors have prepared for the exam by participating in the first-year Putnam Seminar 18.A34 (Mathematical Problem Solving, Putnam Seminar) who was a three-time Putnam Fellow when he was an undergraduate at MIT Zhao encourages students to “use their experience in math competitions as a springboard onto higher mathematics,” and emphasizes the importance of good communication and presentation skills A number of Putnam competitors go on to have successful research careers. Several faculty members of the Department of Mathematics were Putnam Fellows: Davesh Maulik, Bjorn Poonen, Peter Shor, David Vogan, and Zhao. In Putnam’s history only eight participants were four-time Putnam Fellows the first four-time Putnam Fellow was former MIT student Don Coppersmith '72 who went on to have a successful research career in cryptography Success at math competitions “is neither necessary nor sufficient to becoming a good research mathematician,” according to Zhao. Nevertheless, he believes that the skills promoted by math competitions can be useful in research mathematics. Zhao regularly works with MIT undergraduate students to produce cutting-edge research results “I am very fortunate to work with these amazing students,” says Zhao Administered by the Mathematical Association of America the competition included 150 MIT students among 4,229 test-takers from 570 U.S taken over two sessions on the first Saturday of December each year consists of 12 problems worth 10 points each Fewer than a fourth of all participants of this competition scored more than 10 points total Complete results from the competition can be found on the MAA website. For more history on the competition, former MAA President Joseph A. Gallian wrote an interesting 2015 overview.  For the second time in the history of the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition the Putnam Competition is the premier mathematical competition for undergraduate students in the United States and Canada and is administered by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) which features 12 proof-based math problems was taken by 2,975 undergraduates from 427 institutions on Dec This is the MIT team’s sixth first-place win in the past eight competitions Princeton University came in second and Harvard University came in third MIT is awarded $25,000 for being the top team Zhang was also a Putnam Fellow in 2018 and 2019 Both students made Putnam Fellow every year they participated in the competition No official 2020 Putnam Competition was held due to the Covid-19 pandemic The fifth MIT student to receive this honor since the award began in 1992 Kim was also recognized by the Department of Mathematics as a top female scorer in the 2019 contest MIT students also dominated the rest of the scoreboard: nine of the next 10 (each awarded $1,000) and 40 of the 78 honorable mention rankings “I congratulate all the students for their performance in the Putnam Competition. It’s an amazing accomplishment,” says Yufei Zhao, assistant professor of mathematics, who oversees the competition at MIT and also coaches first-year students for the competitions via class 18.A34 (Mathematical Problem Solving, Putnam Seminar) “We are very proud of the academic excellence of our students and we celebrate the results of their hard work.” All five Putnam Fellows were former students in Zhao’s Putnam Seminar.  which attracts top high school students to its STEM classes also counted many alumni among the top scorers “I think about 45 percent of the top winners are PRIMES alumni,” says Pavel Etingof a math professor who is also chief research advisor of the Department of Mathematics’ PRIMES high school math research program A full list of the rankings and names of the students can be found on the Putnam website only eight students achieved Putnam Fellow all four years and a Harvard student who is now a math professor at MIT Current MIT math professors who were Putnam Fellows also include Davesh Maulik Only 23 other students in the contest's history are three-time Putnam Fellows; Zhang joins five other former MIT students This year’s competition returned to its standard format after being curtailed by the pandemic; last year’s 81st Putnam was an online contest with no winners named MIT’s 2019 top scorers made Putnam history when all five Putnam Fellows were from one institution about 150 MIT students took the six-hour exam The top score this year was 119 out of 120 points the median score on the exam was four out of 120 points.  and the efforts of all those involved demonstrate how much our community values this annual event,” says MAA Executive Director Michael Pearson “I commend every student who attempted this collection of challenging problems displaying and developing their creativity These are the skills that will be necessary to solve the challenging problems that humankind faces today and will face in the future.” The competition was founded in 1927 by Elizabeth Lowell Putnam in memory of her husband William Lowell Putnam administered by the Mathematical Association of America Equiangular lines are lines in space that pass through a single point Picture in 2D the three diagonals of a regular hexagon the six lines connecting opposite vertices of a regular icosahedron (see the figure above) Mathematicians are not limited to three dimensions “In high dimensions, things really get interesting, and the possibilities can seem limitless,” says Yufei Zhao according to Zhao and his team of MIT mathematicians who sought to solve this problem on the geometry of lines in high-dimensional space It’s a problem that researchers have been puzzling over for at least 70 years.   The mathematics of equiangular lines can be encoded using graph theory The paper provides new insights into an area of mathematics known as spectral graph theory which provides mathematical tools for studying networks Spectral graph theory has led to important algorithms in computer science such as Google’s PageRank algorithm for its search engine.  This new understanding of equiangular lines has potential implications for coding and communications Equiangular lines are examples of “spherical codes,” which are important tools in information theory allowing different parties to send messages to each other over a noisy communication channel such as those sent between NASA and its Mars rovers The problem of studying the maximum number of equiangular lines with a given angle was introduced in a 1973 paper of P.W.H “This is a beautiful result providing a surprisingly sharp answer to a well-studied problem in extremal geometry that received a considerable amount of attention starting already in the ’60s,” says Princeton University professor of mathematics Noga Alon The new work by the MIT team provides what Zhao calls “a satisfying resolution to this problem.” “There were some good ideas at the time, but then people got stuck for nearly three decades,” Zhao says. There was some important progress made a few years ago by a team of researchers including Benny Sudakov a professor of mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich Zhao hosted Sudakov’s visit to MIT in February 2018 when Sudakov spoke in the combinatorics research seminar about his work on equiangular lines Jiang was inspired to work on the problem of equiangular lines based on the work of his former PhD advisor Bukh Boris at Carnegie Mellon University Jiang and Zhao teamed up in the summer of 2019 “I wanted to find a good summer research project and I thought that this was a great problem to work on,” Zhao explains “I thought we might make some nice progress but it was definitely beyond my expectations to completely solve the entire problem.” The research was partially supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Yao and Zhang participated in the research through the Department of Mathematics’ Summer Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) and Tidor was their graduate student mentor Their results had earned them the mathematics department’s Hartley Rogers Jr “It is one of the most successful outcomes of the SPUR program,” says Zhao “It’s not every day that a long-standing open problem gets solved.” One of the key mathematical tools used in the solution is known as spectral graph theory Spectral graph theory tells us how to use tools from linear algebra to understand graphs and networks The “spectrum” of a graph is obtained by turning a graph into a matrix and looking at its eigenvalues “It is as if you shine an intense beam of light on a graph and then examine the spectrum of colors that come out,” Zhao explains “We found that the emitted spectrum can never be too heavily concentrated near the top It turns out that this fundamental fact about the spectra of graphs has never been observed.” The work gives a new theorem in spectral graph theory — that a bounded degree graph must have sublinear second eigenvalue multiplicity The proof requires clever insights relating the spectrum of a graph with the spectrum of small pieces of the graph “The proof worked out cleanly and beautifully,” Zhao says “We had so much fun working on this problem together.” The Standard Model of particle physics describes all the known elementary particles and three of the four fundamental forces governing the universe; everything except gravity strong, and weak — govern how particles are formed Studying particle and nuclear physics within this framework and relies on large-scale numerical studies. For example, many aspects of the strong force require numerically simulating the dynamics at the scale of 1/10th to 1/100th the size of a proton to answer fundamental questions about the properties of protons “Ultimately, we are computationally limited in the study of proton and nuclear structure using lattice field theory,” says assistant professor of physics Phiala Shanahan “There are a lot of interesting problems that we know how to address in principle but we just don’t have enough compute even though we run on the largest supercomputers in the world.” To push past these limitations, Shanahan leads a group that combines theoretical physics with machine learning models. In their paper “Equivariant flow-based sampling for lattice gauge theory,” published this month in Physical Review Letters they show how incorporating the symmetries of physics theories into machine learning and artificial intelligence architectures can provide much faster algorithms for theoretical physics.  “We are using machine learning not to analyze large amounts of data but to accelerate first-principles theory in a way which doesn’t compromise the rigor of the approach,” Shanahan says “This particular work demonstrated that we can build machine learning architectures with some of the symmetries of the Standard Model of particle and nuclear physics built in and accelerate the sampling problem we are targeting by orders of magnitude.”  Shanahan launched the project with MIT graduate student Gurtej Kanwar and with Michael Albergo The project expanded to include Center for Theoretical Physics postdocs Daniel Hackett and Denis Boyda, NYU Professor Kyle Cranmer and physics-savvy machine-learning scientists at Google Deep Mind Sébastien Racanière and Danilo Jimenez Rezende This month’s paper is one in a series aimed at enabling studies in theoretical physics that are currently computationally intractable “Our aim is to develop new algorithms for a key component of numerical calculations in theoretical physics,” says Kanwar “These calculations inform us about the inner workings of the Standard Model of particle physics our most fundamental theory of matter. Such calculations are of vital importance to compare against results from particle physics experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN both to constrain the model more precisely and to discover where the model breaks down and must be extended to something even more fundamental.” The only known systematically controllable method of studying the Standard Model of particle physics in the nonperturbative regime is based on a sampling of snapshots of quantum fluctuations in the vacuum By measuring properties of these fluctuations one can infer properties of the particles and collisions of interest This technique comes with challenges, Kanwar explains. “This sampling is expensive, and we are looking to use physics-inspired machine learning techniques to draw samples far more efficiently,” he says. “Machine learning has already made great strides on generating images, including, for example, recent work by NVIDIA to generate images of faces 'dreamed up' by neural networks Thinking of these snapshots of the vacuum as images, we think it's quite natural to turn to similar methods for our problem.” “In our approach to sampling these quantum snapshots we optimize a model that takes us from a space that is easy to sample to the target space: given a trained model sampling is then efficient since you just need to take independent samples in the easy-to-sample space and transform them via the learned model.” the group has introduced a framework for building machine-learning models that exactly respect a class of symmetries called "gauge symmetries," crucial for studying high-energy physics Shanahan and colleagues used their framework to train machine-learning models to simulate a theory in two dimensions resulting in orders-of-magnitude efficiency gains over state-of-the-art techniques and more precise predictions from the theory This paves the way for significantly accelerated research into the fundamental forces of nature using physics-informed machine learning The group’s first few papers as a collaboration discussed applying the machine-learning technique to a simple lattice field theory and developed this class of approaches on compact connected manifolds which describe the more complicated field theories of the Standard Model Now they are working to scale the techniques to state-of-the-art calculations Led by the Laboratory for Nuclear Science the IAIFI is comprised of both physics and AI researchers at MIT and Harvard “Our collaboration is a great example of the spirit of IAIFI with a team with diverse backgrounds coming together to advance AI and physics simultaneously” says Shanahan As well as research like Shanahan’s targeting physics theory IAIFI researchers are also working to use AI to enhance the scientific potential of various facilities including the Large Hadron Collider and the Laser Interferometer Gravity Wave Observatory he was intrigued by a 2001 conjecture by Rutgers University mathematician Jeff Kahn regarding the number of independent sets in a graph. An independent set in a graph is a subset of vertices such that no two of them are joined by an edge “Many important structures can be modeled using independent sets,” said Zhao if the graph models some kind of incompatibility then an independent set represents a mutually compatible collection.” Zhao was participating in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) summer program in Duluth, Minnesota, and while he was researching what would be one of his first math research papers, he came across a combinatorics problem by Kahn. The problem puzzled him. An attempt to solve it came close, as he described in a paper he wrote with David Galvin in 2010 titled “The number of independent sets in a graph with small maximum degree.” and is now the Class of 1956 Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT Zhao decided to pass on the challenge to his “fearless” student mathematicians sophomore Ashwin Sah and junior Mehtaab Sawhney who Sawhney coincidentally befriended at that REU program in Duluth, also takes combinatorics classes at MIT they debated their ideas online as well as at many a late-night marathon session in Building 2 “where they tore apart one inequality after another.” they came to me with a solution of this old conjecture,” he says “Lots of experienced mathematicians have worked on this conjecture without success.”   To cap off their success, they have published a paper — “The number of independent sets in an irregular graph” — in Journal of Combinatorial Theory ends ups being very technical,” says Sawhney “Figuring out how to handle all the various terms that appear in our proof and reduce them into a manageable form plays a key role.” Adds Stoner: “Probably the most challenging part in retrospect was discovering a particular application of Holder's Inequality This allowed for the inductive inequality to be transformed into something completely local.” the hardest part was “figuring out the right approach and framing and understanding the theorem in the correct way.” “Once we believed that the ‘local inequality’ was true it allowed us to view the problem in a very different way compared to what was already known and although there are still lots of difficulties beyond this realization it definitely underpins the whole effort,” Sah says “It was great to see my old conjecture finally resolved and even better to see what it led to. Some of the problems settled by Yufei and company had been tried by some excellent much more experienced people. Of course having a fresh young mind can also be an advantage.” is now happy to check that conjecture off his bucket list But he is even happier to have students like them in his combinatorics class “They are constantly asking questions and bombarding me with ideas The techniques that they found to solve that conjecture quickly led to work on several related problems, including for their upcoming paper “A Reverse Sidorenko Inequality,” related to graph colorings and graph homomorphisms Explains Zhao: “This paper solves several open problems concerning graph colorings and homomorphisms including one of my favorite problems regarding maximizing the number of q-colorings in a d-regular graph.”    who is the author or coauthor of six papers in total “Most graduate students don’t have as many papers.” “Often we discuss ideas over the phone or in person and tend to communicate ideas quickly even if they are only half-baked,” Sawhney says “This leads to always feeling as if there is something else to try on a problem we are working on.” Adds Stoner: “When it comes time to execute these ideas in detail we generally try to play to each of our individual strengths.” Ashwin describes their dynamic as “pretty relaxed,” using Slack and other online mediums to discuss ideas and debate the shortcomings of various methods when they can’t meet up in person “There's definitely always something happening and something to think about,” he says Sah says that collaborative atmosphere is what attracted him to MIT.  “I'm definitely grateful to be able to work with this particular group of people on combinatorics research,” he says MIT students captured numerous individual and team honors in the 2018 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition earning 17 out of the top 27 scores.  Yuan Yao and Shengtong Zhang were named Putnam Fellows a distinction given to the top five individual contestants in the competition and Danielle Wang received the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize It was her second win in the category The combined scores of student team members Junyao Peng and Yunkun Zhou captured second place in the team competition, just behind first place winner Harvard University MIT students overall took 11 of the first 15 spots in the demanding six-hour mathematics competition. Counting honorable mentions 45 of the top 101 students were from MIT.  The exam consists of 12 problems, worth 10 points each, that students work on over two three-hour sessions on Dec. 1, 2018. Contest results were announced Feb The highest exam score was 114 out of a possible 120 points as an example of just how tough this exam is The honors also come with cash awards. The team earned earned the Department of Mathematics $20,000 for placing second with each team member also receiving $800. Putnam Fellows receive $2,500 while the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize winner gets $1,000 “I am super proud of our students' performance on the Putnam Competition,” said MIT’s Putnam coach and math professor Yufei Zhao “The number of high scorers from MIT shows the unparalleled strength of our undergraduate math community.” Department of Mathematics Head Michel Goemans added: “Once again the performance of our MIT undergrads at the Putnam competition has been phenomenal We are so fortunate at MIT to have such a large group of mathematically brilliant students.” Many Putnam competitors have experience in Math Olympiad-type competitions, and MIT students can enroll in the fall 18.A34 (Mathematical Problem Solving: Putnam Seminar) a three-time Putnam Fellow who took the same class under professors Richard Stanley and Hartley Rogers and students practice with past years’ Putnam exams.  Of the three non-MIT Putnam Fellows, all from Harvard this year, two also have strong MIT ties as 2014 alums of the Department of Mathematics’ PRIMES program: Shyam Narayanan (PRIMES-USA 2014) and David Stoner (RSI 2014). Stoner also studies combinatorics under Zhao The 79th Putnam Competition was administered by the Mathematical Association of America It saw a total of 164 MIT students competing among 4,623 test-takers from 568 U.S and took five of the six Putnam Fellows spots and 38 percent of the top 100 ranking individual students were from the Institute After years of tinkering, the dynamic programming language Julia 1.0 was officially released to the public during JuliaCon an annual conference of Julia users held recently in London The release of Julia 1.0 is a huge Julia milestone since MIT Professor Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral Shah released Julia to developers in 2012  “Julia has been revolutionizing scientific and technical computing since 2009,” says Edelman, the year the creators started working on a new language that combined the best features of Ruby, MatLab, C, Python, R, and others. Edelman is director of the Julia Lab at MIT and one of the co-creators of the language at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).  with more than 700 active open source contributors and a reported 101 percent annual rate of download growth It is used at more than 700 universities and research institutions and by companies such as Aviva Julia is the only high-level dynamic programming language in the “petaflop club,” having achieved 1.5 petaflop/s using 1.3 million threads, 650,000 cores and 9,300 Knights Landing (KNL) nodes to catalogue 188 million stars, galaxies, and other astronomical objects in 14.6 minutes on the world’s sixth-most powerful supercomputer Julia is also used to power self-driving cars and 3-D printers as well as applications in precision medicine machine learning, and risk management “The release of Julia 1.0 signals 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++,” Edelman says.  TechRepublic reporter Nick Heath writes about Julia 1.0 a programming language created by MIT researchers “The breadth of Julia's capabilities and ability to spread workloads across hundreds of thousands of processing cores have led to its use for everything from machine learning to large-scale supercomputer simulation,” writes Heath Travis Dillon, a graduate student in mathematics at MIT, has been awarded the 2022 AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student and fellow math doctoral student Alex Cohen has received an honorable mention Dillon earned this year’s honor for his significant work in number theory and symbolic dynamics as an undergraduate at Lawrence University where he studied mathematics and music theory In addition to independent studies with Lawrence faculty Dillon attended summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates at Bucknell University and he spent a year in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program Dillon says he is committed to communicating mathematics to a broader audience and seeks to lure others into active engagement with the field through his clarity of presentation and sense of humor He has been a volunteer tutor or instructor both in Budapest and at Lawrence and he has written a 200-page textbook for a general audience titled “Graphs Growing up near Newport, Washington, Dillon developed an interest in mathematics after spending two summers at Canada/USA Mathcamp He joined the MIT mathematics doctoral program this past fall “I have been fortunate to have a large number of mentors “And to my parents: Thank you for supporting me unconditionally even when you weren’t entirely sure what I was doing or why I was doing it.” Cohen receives an honorable mention for the 2022 AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student for solving a number of long-standing open problems covering areas from combinatorics to analysis and partial differential equations.  Cohen graduated from Yale University in 2021 with a dual BS/MS degree in mathematics His mathematical interests including harmonic analysis and has made important progress on the study of different notions of the rank of a tensor a topic of central importance in combinatorics and theoretical computer science Cohen has also done outstanding work in combinatorial geometry and collaborators “who made learning math all the more fun as well as my family for their ceaseless support.” Dillon and Cohen will be recognized Jan. 5, 2022, during the Joint Prize Session at the 2022 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle One early Saturday morning in December, senior Danielle Wang took a seat alongside 164 others taking the 2018 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition in Walker Memorial For six hours she and 4,622 other undergraduates from 568 institutions in the United States and Canada struggled over enigmatic problems involving group theory “There are some interesting problems on the test every year,” she says “Every year I hope I'll do better than the previous year and I'd say you don't lose anything if you don't.” She earned Putnam’s honorable mention last year she took home the 2015 Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize which is awarded each year to the top-ranking female competitor she looked around Walker and could see many familiar faces from her Math Olympiad days Wang grew up watching her brother compete in math competitions so I have to do the hardest thing,’” she recalls “I have become less sure that that's the best reason It was her experience with the Math Olympiad Summer Program (MOP) that cemented her decision to pursue a mathematics career “MOP has had a huge effect on my life,” she says “I think you learn skills from math contests that are useful for other things that's not something I even cared about back then but I realize now that it was a great (and one-of-a-kind) opportunity for learning these skills and if it wasn't for it I wouldn't have found the opportunity or motivation to do math as much A couple of months after she took the Putnam That means many talented Putnam contestants earned a big zero she also earned her second Elizabeth Putnam prize This prize was introduced in 1992 as a way to encourage more female contestants Two other MIT Elizabeth Putnam Prize winners are Ruth A Britto-Pacumio in 1994 and Yinghui Wang in 2010 “Math competitions, such as the Putnam, have always been a male-dominated scene — which makes Danielle's impressive performance even more so,” says three-time MIT Putnam Fellow Yufei Zhao who is an assistant professor of mathematics Zhao teaches 18.A34 (Mathematical Problem Solving) the Putnam Seminar that discusses methods for solving Putnam problems from previous years It is also a class that attracts few female participants “Then I found out that all of my freshman math contest friends were in it Zhao hopes that more female students will take the Putnam exam “I hope that Danielle's success in math competitions and research can be an encouragement to other female students,” he says Sometimes Wang feels the burden of being such a role model “People might ask you questions like you represent all the other girls who do math pressure to do well to prove something about my whole gender.” However, other sources of encouragement include a growing number of STEM programs and female-centric math competitions, such as the Math Prize for Girls that is held annually at MIT who recently was accepted into MIT’s math PhD program says that she has always felt supported as a female mathematician at MIT and elsewhere the math community is totally OK with people being female.”   Registration for the 2019 Putnam Competition will open on Sept The contest is open to undergraduate students who must participate through their enrolled college or university Senior math major Janabel Xia is a study of a person in constant motion When she isn’t sorting algorithms and improving traffic control systems for driverless vehicles she’s dancing as a member of at least four dance clubs She’s joined several social justice organizations, worked on cryptography and web authentication technology and created a polling app that allows users to vote anonymously with a green light to lessen the carbon footprint of urban transportation by using sensors at traffic light intersections Janabel has been competing on math teams since elementary school which met early mornings before the start of school she discovered a love of problem-solving that challenged her more than her classroom “plug-and-chug exercises.” At Lexington High School, she was math team captain, a two-time Math Olympiad attendee, and a silver medalist for Team USA at the European Girls' Mathematical Olympiad. As a math major, she studies combinatorics and theoretical computer science, including theoretical and applied cryptography. In her sophomore year, she was a researcher in the Cryptography and Information Security Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where she conducted cryptanalysis research under Professor Vinod Vaikuntanathan a private polling app written with the Circom programming language that allows users to create polls for specific sets of people while generating a zero-knowledge proof that keeps personal information hidden to decrease negative voting influences from public perception Her participation in the PKG Center’s Active Community Engagement Freshman Pre-Orientation Program introduced her to local community organizations focusing on food security, housing for formerly incarcerated individuals, and access to health care. She is also part of Reading for Revolution and working-class movements within MIT and the Greater Boston area Xia’s educational journey led to her ongoing pursuit of combining mathematical and computational methods in areas adjacent to urban planning.  “When I realized how much planning was concerned with social justice as it was concerned with design She took classes with the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and is currently working on an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project with Professor Cathy Wu in the Institute for Data Recent work on eco-driving by Wu and doctoral student Vindula Jayawardana investigated semi-autonomous vehicles that communicate with sensors localized at traffic intersections which in theory could reduce carbon emissions by up to 21 percent Xia aims to optimize the implementation scheme for these sensors at traffic intersections considering a graded scheme where perhaps only 20 percent of all sensors are initially installed She wants to maximize the emission reduction rates at each step of the process as well as ensure there is no unnecessary installation and de-installation of such sensors.   Meanwhile, Xia has been a member of MIT’s Fixation, Ridonkulous, and MissBehavior groups, and as a traditional Chinese dance choreographer for the MIT Asian Dance Team.  Xia started with Chinese traditional dance Because she is as much of a dancer as a researcher she has figured out how to make her schedule work with dancers running straight from class to dress rehearsals and shows all evening and coming back early next morning to take down lights and roll up marley [material that covers the stage floor],” she says I couldn’t have survived MIT without dance and most importantly the teamwork that dance demands of us I really love the dance community here with my whole heart These friends have inspired me and given me the love to power me through MIT.” Xia lives with her fellow Dance Team members at the off-campus Women's Independent Living Group (WILG).  “I really value WILG's culture of independence In addition to her UROP, she’s wrapping up some graduation requirements, finishing up a research paper on sorting algorithms from her summer at the University of Minnesota Duluth Research Experience for Undergraduates in combinatorics and deciding between PhD programs in math and computer science.   “My biggest goal right now is to figure out how to combine my interests in mathematics and urban studies and more broadly connect technical perspectives with human-centered work in a way that feels right to me,” she says MIT has given me so many avenues to explore that I would have never thought about before coming here There’s just so much out there to learn about I hope to continue that learning and exploration for the rest of my life.” On the Friday before finals, the crowd in Kresge Auditorium awaited the last MIT Logarhythms’ performance of the year the 16 male singers yell “Logs on three … one Although they can’t see the audience beyond the lights they feed off the crowd’s energy as they harmonize a capella who has been singing with the group since his freshman year Datta chose “Climax,” not just because it’s a song about saying goodbye but because it stretched his range — something that his time with the Logarhythms helped him to do in his life outside the group “I wanted to sing something where I was floating some parts because it’s pretty high,” Datta says “It's in an uncomfortable place in the male register Even after singing it for a few months now which is what I wanted: a song that was unfamiliar territory.” He had been focused on his education in science his entire life As the son of a psychologist and a chemical engineer he was taught “algebra and geometry at the dinner table before my legs were long enough to reach the floor.” At Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring with electives that included quantum physics He also published a paper in Physical Review via the University of Maryland.  When Datta was considering which college to attend MIT stood out as an excellent place to pursue his interests which at the time he described as “the interface of natural sciences and computation particularly quantum computation and computational biology.” But the deciding factor was how MIT students pursued their interests there was a marked difference between MIT and everywhere else,” he says “Many clever students go through the motions of the college application process and end up with a carefully manicured résumé but no clear sense of passion What set MIT apart for me was that everyone is passionate about something You can see it in the ways students spend their time outside of academics: tinkering When he first came across the Logarhythms’ information table as a freshman, he saw it as a good way to make friends. But it also turned out to be time-consuming: In addition to six hours of rehearsal a week with group and more time on his own, there were performances, competitions, and even an album recording Datta’s commitment to the Logarhythms helped him structure his time better and formed a counterpoint to the stress of academic pursuits As soon as he entered the Logs’ practice space or climbed onstage he easily switched gears from busy student to singer and generally engaged with the feel of the music,” Datta said “We try to leave the rest of our thoughts and distractions at the door and to give us a reprieve from the other things we’re working on.” Datta wants to build a career in quantum physics He has received a $138,000 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and will choose between a DAAD scholarship at the Technische Universität München or attending one of the programs at Cambridge University He is also considering working for a while at first and to start writing a book about the history of string theory he’ll spend this summer in an exchange program with a grant from the Department of Energy and National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Italy to search for dark matter candidates via machine learning at Frascati National Laboratory.  he eventually hopes to return to the stage whether it be via a coffeehouse solo or another a capella group He also will join the Logarhythms’ extensive alumni network the most active of whom attend performances and help with song arrangements he’s having trouble believing that his time with the Logarhythms is over “The Logs has been the utmost formative experience of my college education,” he says A key challenge in the embryonic development of complex life forms is the correct specification of cell positions so that organs and limbs grow in the right places To understand how cells arrange themselves at the earliest stages of development an interdisciplinary team of applied mathematicians at MIT and experimentalists at Princeton University identified mathematical principles governing the packings of interconnected cell assemblies In a paper entitled “Entropic effects in cell lineage tree packings,” published this month in Nature Physics the team reports direct experimental observations and mathematical modeling of cell packings in convex enclosures a biological packing problem encountered in many complex organisms the authors investigated multi-cellular packings in the egg chambers of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster Each egg chamber contains exactly 16 germline cells that are linked by cytoplasmic bridges resulting from a series of incomplete cell divisions The linkages form a branched cell-lineage tree which is enclosed by an approximately spherical hull one of the 16 cells develops into the fertilizable egg and the relative positioning of the cells is thought to be important for the biochemical signal exchange during the early stages of development The group run by Princeton's Stanislav Y. Shvartsman a professor of chemical and biological engineering and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton succeeded in measuring the spatial positions and connectivities between individual cells in more than 100 egg chambers The experimentalists found it difficult to explain why certain tree configurations occurred much more frequently than others an associate professor in the MIT Department of Mathematics So while Shvartsman’s team were able to visualize the cell connections in complex biological systems began to develop a mathematical framework to describe the statistics of the observed cell packings.   “This project has been a prime example of an extremely enjoyable interdisciplinary collaboration between cell biology and applied mathematics,” Dunkel says The experiments were performed by Shvartsman’s PhD student Jasmin Imran Alsous who will begin a postdoctoral position at Adam Martin’s lab in the MIT Department of Biology this fall They were analyzed in collaboration with postdoc Paul Villoutreix who is now at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel Dunkel points out that while human biology is considerably more complex than a fruit fly’s the underlying tissue organization processes share many common aspects “The cell trees in the egg chamber store the history of the cell divisions like an ancestry tree in a sense,” he says “What we were able to do was to map the problem of packing the cell tree into an egg chamber onto a nice and simple mathematical model that basically asks: If you take the fundamental convex polyhedrons with 16 vertices how many different ways are there to embed 16 cells on them while keeping all the bridges intact?” The presence of rigid physical connections between cells adds interesting new constraints that make the problem different from the most commonly considered packing problems such as the question of how to arrange oranges efficiently so that they can be transported in as few containers as possible The interdisciplinary study of Dunkel and his colleagues which combined modern biochemical protein labelling techniques shows that constrained tree packing problems arise naturally in biological systems Understanding the packing principles of cells in tissues at the various stages of development remains a major challenge Depending on a variety of biological and physical factors cells originating from a single founder cell can develop in vastly different ways to form muscles While the developmental process “involves a huge number of degrees of freedom the end result in many cases is highly complex yet also very reproducible and robust,” Dunkel says whether such robust complexity can be understood in terms of a basic set of biochemical “Our study shows that simple physical constraints like cell-cell bridges arising from incomplete divisions what we are trying to do is to identify relatively simple tractable models that allow us to make predictions about these complex systems mathematical simplification must go hand-in-hand with experimental insight from biology.” Since incomplete cell-divisions have also been seen in amphibians Dunkel hopes the modeling approach developed in the paper might be applicable to those systems as well “Physical constraints could play a significant role in determining the preferences for certain types of multicellular organizations and that may have secondary implications for larger-scale tissue dynamics which are not yet clear to us A simple way you can think about it is that these cytoplasmic bridges can help the organism to localize cells into desired positions,” he says “This would appear to be a very robust strategy.”