Mathematics

Frequent Director's Visitor Siobhan Roberts chronicles the life and impact of the late Lotfi Zadeh, logician and former Member in the School of Mathematics, whose innovative and controversial work on fuzzy logic was met with both ardent support and...

In a breakthrough that disproves decades of conventional wisdom, two mathematicians, including Maryanthe Malliaris, von Neumann Fellow in the School of Mathematics, have shown that two different variants of infinity are actually the same size. The...

Philip Anderson won the 1977 Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of what is now called Anderson localization, a term that refers to waves that stay in some “local” region rather than propagating the way you’d expect. He studied the phenomenon...

The IAS/Park City Mathematics Institute (PCMI), an Institute for Advanced Study outreach program of professional development for the entire mathematics community, has received a $1.25 million gift from a private foundation. This grant, which is a...

Strike a billiard ball on a frictionless table with no pockets so that it never stops bouncing off the table walls. If you returned years later, what would you find? Would the ball have settled into some repeating orbit, like a planet circling the...

Harvard University will hold a memorial in celebration of the life and legacy of Maryam Mirzakhani, Member (2015) in the School of Mathematics, on Sunday, August 13. Speaking on Mirzakhani’s impact on science and society will be Roya Beheshti; Curti...

The mathematics section of the National Academy of Sciences lists 104 members. Just four are women. As recently as June, that number was six. Marina Ratner and Maryam Mirzakhani could not have been more different, in personality and in background....

Machine learning — sometimes called the leading edge of artificial intelligence — is the rapidly developing computer technology behind self-driving cars, complex web searches, medical and science applications, and face and speech recognition...

A $2 million donation from Eric and Wendy Schmidt will support the launch of the Program in Theoretical Machine Learning in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Mathematics. Eric Schmidt is the Executive Chairman of Google; Wendy Schmidt is...

Abstract mathematics sometimes has surprisingly practical applications, to not only physics but other arenas as well. Take, for example, the work of extraordinarily innovative mathematician and former Member Maryam Mirzakhani, whose recent death at...