Math Fair for AIM’s 30th Birthday Celebration
On Saturday, June 29, 2024, an estimated 700 students, friends, parents, and kids of all ages joined the AIM staff, trustees, board members and volunteers for a day of mathematical fun, games, puzzles, prizes, and treats. The event was free and open to the public. Along with the twenty or so math games and activities there was a face painting booth, snow cones, and ice cream bars. There was also a taco truck that did a brisk lunch business. The support of the Caltech community was terrific and helped make the day a great success.
Alexanderson Award
The American Institute of Mathematics has announced the fifth Alexanderson Award. The award is given in honor of Gerald Alexanderson, Professor of Mathematics at Santa Clara University and founding chair of AIM’s Board of Trustees. The Alexanderson Award recognizes outstanding research articles arising from AIM research activities that have been published within the past three years.
The recipients of this year’s Alexanderson Award are Kaisa Matomäki, Maksym Radziwiłł, Terence Tao, Joni Teräväinen, and Tamar Ziegler for their paper “Higher uniformity of bounded multiplicative functions in short intervals on average” published in the Annals of Mathematics in 2023. The research originated from a working group at the AIM workshop “Sarnak’s conjecture” in December, 2018
On January 3, 2024, all five recipients were honored at the Prize Session of the 2024 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco, and on January 4 Joni Teräväinen delivered the Alexanderson Award Lecture. Read more…
AIM Director Brian Conrey with two of the award winners Terence Tao and Joni Teräväinen
Congratulations to Rina Foygel Barber!
On October 4, 2023, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the 2023 MacArthur Fellows. Among this distinguished group is Rina Foygel Barber, Professor of Statistics at the University of Chicago and a member of AIM’s Scientific Research Board. Rina was also the organizer of an AIM SQuaRE. For a brief description of her work see the MacArthur Foundation announcement.
AIM has moved to Pasadena!
After more than two decades in the Bay Area, AIM has moved to its new home on the Caltech campus in Pasadena. On July 10, 2023, AIM began operating in the new Richard Merkin Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics, a research center and conference space that has been established in connection with AIM’s move to Caltech, with support from Richard N. Merkin and the Merkin Family Foundation.
More information can be found under Visitors in the main menu above and also in the original announcement of the new AIM-Caltech partnership.
Math activities for students, teachers, families — just about everyone!
AIM’s Math Communities website has a new calendar of upcoming math activities you can take part in.
Math that feels good
Creating learning resources for blind students
Martha Siegel, Professor Emerita from Towson University in Maryland, was working with a blind student who needed a statistics textbook for a required course. The Braille version of the textbook required six months to prepare, a delay which caused the student a significant delay in her studies. Siegel reached out to Al Maneki, a retired NSA mathematician who is blind, and the two of them decided to do something about it.
Focusing on math textbooks initially, Siegel and Maneki pulled together a collaborative team intent on solving the problem. “We were shocked to realize there did not already exist an automated method for producing mathematics Braille textbooks,” said Alexei Kolesnikov, a colleague of Siegel at Towson University and member of the team. Read more…
