Autumn 2010 Volume 5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1ntegral n e w s f r o m t h e mathematics d e p a r t m e n t a t m i t The retirement of seven of our illustrious col- leagues this year—Mike Artin, David Ben- Inside ney, Dan Kleitman, Arthur Mattuck, Is Sing- er, Dan Stroock, and Alar Toomre—marks • Faculty news 2–3 a shift to a new generation of faculty, from • Women in math 3 those who entered the field in the Sputnik era to those who never knew life without email • A minority perspective 4 and the Internet. The older generation built • Student news 4–5 the department into the academic power- house it is today—indeed they were the core • Funds for RSI and SPUR 5 of the department, its leadership and most • Retiring faculty and staff 6–7 distinguished members, during my early years at MIT. Now, as they are in the process • Alumni corner 8 of retiring, I look around and see that my con- temporaries are becoming the department’s Dear Friends, older group. Yikes! another year gone by and what a year it Other big changes are in the works. Two of Marina Chen have taken the lead in raising an was. We’re getting older, and younger, cele- our dedicated long-term administrators— endowment for them. Together with those of brating prizes and long careers, remembering Joanne Jonsson and Linda Okun—have Tim Lu ’79 and Peiti Tung ’79, their commit- our past and looking to the future. It is a re- stepped down from their positions running ments thus far reach over $1 million, a mar- markable time to be in Mathematics at MIT. the undergraduate and graduate offices. velous contribution whose income will cover This year continues our drive to renew our We’ve reorganized and combined those en- nearly half the cost of both RSI and SPUR. faculty. Five superb mathematicians have tities into a single office, Mathematics Aca- We’re grateful for their help. recently accepted offers to join our faculty: demic Services, under the leadership of our As MIT prepares to celebrate its 150th anni- Professors Alexei Borodin (representation new Academic Administrator, Jeffrey Kinna- versary this year, plans are forming for re- theory and probability) and Peter Ozsváth mon. He and our new Administrative Officer, storing the main group of Buildings 1 thru 10 (geometric topology), and Assistant Profes- Sarah Smith, will be modernizing departmen- over the next decade or so. We are conduct- sors Clark Barwick (algebraic topology), tal processes by moving record-keeping into ing an architectural study of the department’s Jacob Fox (combinatorics), and Sug Woo electronic databases, among other things. home in Building 2 in preparation for its ren- Shin (number theory). We are strengthening The Simons Lectures will continue in fine ovation, the timing of which will depend in our ties outside the department with the joint form again this year. Princeton’s Manjul part on fundraising success. appointments of Associate Professors Martin Bhargava and Cornell’s Steven Strogatz will We want to thank the members of our Visit- Bazant and Peko Hosoi, with ChemE and speak in the series in April. ing Committee, which met with department MechE respectively, and the appointment of The opportunity to teach fantastic students is members last spring and favorably reviewed Adjunct Professor Henry Cohn from Micro- one of the many blessings of being at MIT, our programs. John Reed, who served as soft Research, New England. and this year was exceptionally good. We Chair of the Mathematics Visiting Commit- Broadening our department’s gender and awarded 23 PhDs, nearly all of whom are tee for the past decade, has moved on to be racial diversity will have renewed emphasis moving on to postdocs or other positions de- Chair of the MIT Corporation, wonderful in recruitment at all levels in coming years. spite the tough job market. Our undergradu- news for the Institute. We hope that John’s Noted authority William Vélez will be a ates claimed one-third of the top (Honorable yet-to-be-announced replacement on our Vis- Martin Luther King Visiting Professor of Mention and higher) scores across all of iting Committee will be as committed to the Mathematics this spring, and we will aim to North America in the 2009 Putnam Competi- department as he has been. st understand and emulate his striking success tion, and our team won 1 place. Look inside for further details on these and at bringing underrepresented minorities into Our RSI and SPUR summer research pro- other stories. Have a good year! mathematics at the University of Arizona. grams for high-school and undergraduate Toby Colding and Paul Seidel received the students continue to produce amazing results, 2010 Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, a winning major prizes at the Intel and Siemens major recognition. Of the 27 individuals who Science Talent Searches. The department Michael Sipser have been honored with this prize since it currently supports these important programs Department Head was established in 1964, four are now on the with scarce discretionary funds, so we are MIT faculty. pleased to announce that Chi-Fu Huang and 2 New faculty Awards Alexei Borodin, Professor of Math- ematics, comes to MIT from Caltech, where he has been on the faculty since 2003. Borodin studies prob- lems on the interface of representa- tion theory and probability that link to combinatorics, random matrix the- ory, and integrable systems. In 2001 he received a long-term research fellowship from the Clay Mathemat- ics Institute. He was awarded the Prize of the Moscow Mathematical Society in 2003 and the Prize of the European Mathematical Society in 2008. Borodin received his PhD from the University of Pennsylva- Toby Colding and Paul Seidel received the 2010 AMS Oswald nia in 2001 under Alexandre Kirillov. Veblen Prize in Geometry, “awarded to Tobias H. Colding and William P. Minicozzi II for their profound work on minimal Peter Ozsváth, Professor of Mathemat- surfaces,” and for Paul Seidel’s “fundamental contributions to ics, joins the mathematics faculty this year. symplectic geometry and, in particular, for his development of A professor at Columbia University since advanced algebraic methods for computation of symplectic in- 2004, Ozsváth is a leading expert in low- variants.” John Bush was elected Fellow of the American Physi- dimensional geometric topology. In 2007, cal Society. Michael Artin, Tom Leighton, and Gil Strang were he received the AMS Oswald Veblen Prize each named SIAM Fellows. Tom Mrowka received a Guggen- in Geometry with Zoltán Szabó for their heim Fellowship. Katrin Wehrheim received an NSF PECASE work on a new class of invariants. He was a (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers). Guggenheim Fellow in 2008 and appointed Denis Auroux, Alexei Borodin, Kiran Kedlaya, Ivan Loseu, a Clay Research Scholar at MSRI in the James McKernan, and Scott Sheffield gave invited lectures at spring of 2010. Ozsváth received his PhD ICM 2010. Richard Stanley gave the AMS Colloquium Lec- from Princeton under John Morgan in 1994. tures and Peter Shor the AMS Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture at Clark Barwick, Assistant Profes- the 2010 joint AMS-MAA-SIAM meeting. Abhinav Kumar re- sor of Mathematics, joins our faculty ceived an NSF CAREER Award. Jon Kelner received a Sloan from Harvard University, where he Research Fellowship. served as a Benjamin Peirce Lecturer. Katrin Wehrheim was promoted to Associate Professor. Barwick is an algebraic topologist in- terested in the interactions between Two of our staff were recognized for outstanding service this K-theory, homotopy theory, and al- year. Financial Administrator Danforth Nicholas received both gebraic geometry. He completed his the School of Science Infinite Kilometer Award and the MIT Ex- PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 under Tony Pantev, cellence Award. Administrative Officer Sarah Smith received and subsequently held postdoctoral appointments at the Mathematics the School of Science Infinite Mile Award. Institute in Göttingen, the University of Oslo, and the IAS. Jacob Fox joins MIT as a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Other recent faculty appointments Professor of Applied Mathematics. Henry Cohn, Adjunct Professor. A Principal His interests span extremal combina- Researcher at Microsoft Research, New England, torics, combinatorial geometry, and Cohn works across several fields in discrete probabilistic combinatorics. A gradu- mathematics, including computational and ate of MIT, Fox received both the analytic number theory, algebraic combinatorics, department’s Jon A. Bucsela prize and theoretical computer science. and the AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan prize in 2006. He was recently awarded SIAM’s Dénes Anette (Peko) Hosoi, Associate Professor König Prize for outstanding research in discrete mathematics. He com- joint with Mechanical Engineering. Hosoi is pleted his PhD at Princeton University under Benny Sudakov in 2010. interested in instabilities in viscous flows, low Sug Woo Shin will join us as Assistant Pro- Reynolds number locomotion, and bioinspired fessor of Mathematics in September 2011. design. A number theorist, Sug Woo specializes in the Langlands program, connecting arith- metic geometry and representation theory. Martin Bazant, Associate Professor joint He completed his PhD at Harvard Univer- with Chemical Engineering. Bazant’s interests sity under Richard Taylor in 2007, and sub- include nonlinear electrokinetics, microfluidics, sequently held a Clay Liftoff Fellowship at and granular flow. the IAS. He is currently appointed as a Dickson Instructor at the Uni- versity of Chicago and will return to the IAS in 2010–11. 3 Women in Math @ MIT by Genevieve Wanucha concerns at the biannual tea parties to us- career possibilities in math. “But the math ing the resources on the new MIT Women community at MIT dispelled my fears,” she in Mathematics website.