Autumn 2009 Volume 4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1ntegraL NEWS FROM THE MATHEMATICS DEPARTMENT AT MIT renewal. About a third of our tenured faculty are nearing retirement. Several have already Inside initiated the process. This spring we celebrated Hartley Rogers’ 54 years on the MIT faculty • Recounting our history 2 at a retirement luncheon for him (see story on page 8). Next year more faculty are planning • Faculty news 3 to retire, including Mike Artin, David Benney, • Student awards 4 Dan Kleitman, Arthur Mattuck, Dan Stroock and Alar Toomre. The Sputnik-era generation • New doctorates 4 has been the core of our department for a long • Donor profile 5 time. Reconstituting ourselves with a new generation is necessary and healthy, of course, • Women in math 6 but still it is hard to imagine our department without these extraordinary people. Fortu- • Math Project Lab 7 nately, many plan to continue teaching and • Celebrating Singer 8 other activities post-retirement. Dear Friends, Our departmental history book, Recountings: Conversations with MIT Mathematicians, has TIME FLIES . Five years ago I was entrusted Fundraising activities continue unabated. with the job of “running” our department. enjoyed tremendous success since its publica- Breakfast talks were held here and in Cali- That being the usual term for department tion last winter. It tells personal stories about fornia to showcase the department’s research. heads, by now I should have gratefully science, politics and administration from the More talks are planned for this year. One handed over the reins of leadership to one 1950s and 1960s. We were most fortunate of our goals is to endow the RSI and SPUR of my colleagues to carry on with his or her to have interviewed former department head summer programs that provide research expe- vision for the future. Yet as you can see, I’m Ken Hoffman a few months before he passed riences for high-schoolers and undergradu- still here writing to you. When our dean of away, and we were thus able to preserve his ates. Our RSI students regularly achieve top science, Marc Kastner, asked me to carry remarkable memories along with those of honors nationally including major scholar- on as head and my colleagues encouraged many others. ships in the Intel and Siemens competitions, as me to do so, I agreed to renew for a second described in our article on student awards on term. I am proud to continue to serve this Finances page four. RSI and SPUR have been supported great department. I believe in MIT, its values, The budget cuts stemming from the financial by scarce departmental discretionary funds its extraordinary faculty and our fantastic crisis add to our challenges this year. We’ve supplemented by foundation and donor con- students. We’re privileged to be here. Much been asked to find spending cutbacks of about tributions. Endowing these valuable programs has been accomplished. Much remains to do. 15 percent over the next three years. With the would insulate them from competing demands fortunate timing of our recently completed for resources as our budget is reduced. People fundraiser, Campaign for Math, we’ve been This year, we’re excited to have two outstand- able to buffer the impact of these cuts sig- This spring will see the reconvening of our ing mathematicians joining our faculty. Lau- nificantly. Some reduction in faculty, staff, departmental visiting committee, which will rent Demanet has arrived as a new assistant instructor and graduate student headcount review our programs. These biannual meet- professor of applied mathematics specializing will still be needed, however. ings involve lots of work, and we appreciate in computational science. Some of his PhD the efforts of those inside the department and research at Caltech and subsequent work at The achievements of the campaign remain especially the participation of the committee Stanford involves developing efficient tech- intact: support for graduate study so that all members who devote precious time to this niques for revealing subterranean Earth struc- 19 incoming graduate students this year are activity. ture from measurements of surface earthquake on fellowships, and support for two new waves. Peter Ozsváth will come here the fol- endowed professorships—the Leighton As always, I’m eager to hear news and lowing fall as a professor of mathematics. A Family Chair, awarded to Michel Goemans thoughts from you. Send them directly to me Veblen Prize winner, Peter is well known for last year, and the Claude E. Shannon Chair at [email protected]. Have a good year! his work in low-dimensional geometry and (gift of John and Cynthia Reed), recently topology. awarded to Bjorn Poonen. Fellowships and endowed chairs are key components in our The most important item on our collective strategy to recruit and retain the very best fac- Michael Sipser agenda these days continues to be faculty ulty and graduate students. Department Head 2 New faculty Peter Ozsváth, Professor of Mathemat- ics, comes to MIT from Columbia University where he has been a professor since 2004. Ozsváth and his collaborators developed and explored a new class of invariants for charac- terizing three- and four-dimensional mani- folds. In 2007, he received the AMS Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry for his work in low- dimensional geometry and topology. Ozsváth received his PhD from Princeton under John Morgan in 1994. Laurent Demanet, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, comes to MIT after three years at Stanford University. He works broadly in scientific computing, applying methods from harmonic and microlocal analysis to seismology and other areas. Demanet received his PhD in 2006 from Caltech in applied and computational mathematics Peter Ozsváth under Emmanuel Candes. Laurent Demanet Mathematics at MIT in the post-Sputnik years By Sarah H. Wright world events and larger social trends on the Arthur Mattuck, professor of mathematics, science and math communities. on having his lectures online through MIT’s Recountings: Conversations with MIT Math- OpenCourseWare: ematicians, a narrative history of the math Hartley Rogers, professor emeritus of math- department in its formative years, portrays ematics, on teaching at MIT pre- and post- “For me, it’s a mixed blessing. If I mess up the personal and historical contexts in which Sputnik (1957): a lecture, I can tell students to look at it on its subjects and the department achieved re- the website. But it also means I have to avoid markable advances in the field. “The nature of the undergraduate body jokes I made on the web.” abruptly changed around 1959. When I came Editor Joel Segel devoted three years, some to MIT in 1955, I taught elementary sections “Recountings” also includes interviews with two thousand e-mails and hundreds of hours of calculus. Suddenly, instead of giving three Michael Artin, Harvey Greenspan, Sigurdur conducting and editing interviews with a or four As in a freshman section of 25 stu- Helgason, Steven Kleiman, Daniel Kleitman, dozen senior MIT mathematicians. dents, I was giving 10 or 12 As.” Bertram Kostant, Zipporah (Fagi) Levinson, Isadore Singer and Gilbert Strang. He chose the subtitle, “Conversations,” de- Kenneth Hoffman, professor emeritus of liberately, he says. “Narrative is a technology mathematics, explaining the department’s like any other, and one particularly suited success: to capturing inspiration, context, wisdom— intangibles that are crucial to excellence in “Norman [Levinson], like Singer and others any real sense.” … were pushers for constantly increasing department standards. Always reach higher At first, Segel’s subjects weren’t so keen on and higher. Always try to hire people who narrative or intangibles, often declaring they are better than you are. They were just relent- had few memories and not much to say, he less about this. And that gets into the air in a recalls. “The trick lay in finding the subjects place.” they were most comfortable talking about, from research or teaching, to forgotten byways Alar Toomre, professor of applied mathemat- of department history, to how they themselves ics, on advice for young mathematicians: became mathematicians,” he says. “If I were 50 years younger, I’d be looking The result is a volume that offers personal into biology like mad! I’d look into the math- memories, different views on academics ematics of evolution. Maybe even financial and administration, and shows the effects of math, damn it.” Project Editor: Sarah H. Wright Production Coordinator: Carol A. Demers Printed on recycled paper by Arlington Lithograph 3 New faculty professorships George Lusztig has James McKernan Bjorn Poonen has been named the Edward has been appointed the been appointed the A. Abdun-Nur Profes- Norbert Wiener Pro- Claude E. Shannon sor of Mathematics. fessor of Mathematics. Professor of Mathe- The Norbert Wiener McKernan, who works matics. A number the- Professor of Mathemat- in algebraic geometry, orist working in ics since 1999, Lusztig joined the department arithmetic algebraic works on geometric as professor of mathe- geometry and compu- representation theory matics in 2007. tational number theory, and algebraic groups. In 2008, he was hon- Poonen joined the MIT faculty as a full pro- ored with the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for McKernan and his collaborator Christopher fessor in July 2008. Lifetime Achievement, “for entirely reshap- Hacon achieved a stunning breakthrough ing representation theory, and in the process on a famous problem in algebraic geom- Michael Sipser said, “I first encountered changing much of mathematics.” etry concerning the classification of high- Bjorn a few years ago at MSRI. He gave er-dimensional algebraic varieties. In two such a great talk, describing deep, beautiful Professor David Vogan said of Lusztig’s con- papers, one of which was also joint with work and so clearly presented. I wished then tributions, “There are two fundamental and Caucher Birkar and Paolo Cascini, McK- and there that we could hire him at MIT.