Alexanderson Award
The American Institute of Mathematics has announced the fourth Alexanderson Award. The award is given in honor of Gerald Alexanderson, Professor of Mathematics at Santa Clara University and founding chair of AIM’s Board of Trustees. The Alexanderson Award recognizes outstanding research articles arising from AIM research activities that have been published within the past three years.
The recipients of this year’s Alexanderson Award are Jan Bruinier, Benjamin Howard, Stephen S. Kudla, Michael Rapoport, and Tonghai Yang for their paper “Modularity of generating series of divisors on unitary Shimura varieties” published in two parts as a monograph in 2020 in volume 421 of the series Astérisque published by the Société Mathématique de France.
On January 4, 2023, all five recipients will receive their award at the Prize Session during the 2023 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston, and on January 6 Stephen Kudla will deliver the Alexanderson Award Lecture.
Congratulations to Melanie Matchett Wood!
On October 12 the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the 2022 MacArthur Fellows. Among this distinguished group is Melanie Matchett Wood, Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, and member of AIM’s Scientific Research Board. She has been associated with AIM since 2009 when she was named as an AIM Five Year Fellow. Her research ranges across broad areas of number theory with particular emphasis on probabilistic questions in arithmetic geometry. Melanie received her PhD in 2009 from Princeton and has held faculty positions at Stanford, Wisconsin, and Berkeley.
Covid Policy
The AIM staff are fully vaccinated. All participants in activities held at the AIM facility must be fully vaccinated.
50 Years of Number Theory and Random Matrix Theory
This summer from June 21 to 24, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton will host a conference to celebrate the conversation between Hugh Montgomery and Freeman Dyson that took place in the IAS tea room in April 1972. It was then that anyone first realized that the distribution of distances between pairs of zeros of the Riemann zeta-function behaves (after rescaling) like the distribution of distances between the eigenvalues of large random Hermitian matrices.
That conversation began what is now a 50 year long dialog between the areas of number theory and random matrix theory. The conference will examine the history of the interaction, explore the current research, and present the many open questions of interest that promise to keep the dialog going into the future.
Funding from the National Science Foundation will provide full support for at least 25 participants. Apply for support here. Review of applications for support will begin on February 25 and continue until all places are filled.
For more information see the conference website.
Alexanderson Award
The American Institute of Mathematics has announced the third annual 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.
Receiving the 2020 award are Laura DeMarco, Holly Krieger, and Hexi Ye for their paper “Uniform Manin-Mumford for a family of genus 2 curves,” published this year in the Annals of Mathematics. Read more…
Due to the pandemic the 2020 Alexanderson Award Ceremony and Lecture was postponed and took place on September 30, 2021, in the Recital Hall of Santa Clara University.
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.
Upcoming Workshops
- Analytic combinatorics in several variables
April 4-8, 2022. - Random walks beyond hyperbolic groups
April 11-15, 2022. - Stability in mirror symmetry
April 25-29, 2022. - Criticality and stochasticity in quasilinear fluid systems
May 2-6, 2022. - Ehrhart polynomials: inequalities and extremal constructions
May 9-13, 2022. - Global rigidity of actions by higher-rank groups
May 16-20, 2022. - All Upcoming Workshops
AIM Summer School on
Dynamics, Data and the COVID 19 Pandemic
For six weeks this summer more than forty graduate students and advanced undergraduates took part in an online summer program on the mathematics of this critical and timely topic. Students learned the basic mathematical epidemiology underlying the models used in studying COVID19. The program director was Chris Jones (UNC-Chapel Hill).
Faculty: Linda Allen (Texas Tech), James Broda (Bowdoin), Pauline van den Driessche (UVic), Hans Engler (Georgetown), John Gemmer (Wake Forest), Hans Kaper (Georgetown), Richard McGehee (Minnesota), Jack O’Brien (Bowdoin), Nancy Rodriguez (CU-Boulder), Christian Sampson (UNC-Chapel Hill), Mary Silber (Chicago), Erik Van Vleck (Kansas), Jianhong Wu (YorkU), Abdul-Aziz Yakubu (Howard) and Mary Lou Zeeman (Bowdoin).
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…
