Mathematics

On May 26, 2022, IAS celebrated the establishment of the Gopal Prasad Professorship, in recognition of prolific mathematician and six-time IAS Member Gopal Prasad.

Current Visiting Professor Amol Aggarwal has received two prestigious prizes in mathematics: the 2022 Rollo Davidson Prize, for fundamental contributions to random matrix theory and integrable probability; and the 2022 Dubrovin Medal, for contributions to integrable probability, random matrix theory, and moduli spaces. 

Frequent Visiting Professor Noga Alon has won the 2022 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences for his contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science. The prize has been compared to the Nobel and carries with it a monetary award of $1,200,000. 

"If an adversary gives you a machine learning model and secretly plants a malicious backdoor in it, what are the chances that you can discover it? Very little, according to a new paper by researchers at UC Berkeley, MIT, and the Institute for Advanced Study."

"For nearly two centuries, all kinds of researchers interested in how fluids flow have turned to the Navier-Stokes equations. But mathematicians still harbor basic questions about them. Foremost among them: How well do the equations adhere to reality?"

"When the mathematicians Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai first posed their 'expectation threshold' conjecture in 2006, they didn’t believe it themselves. Their claim — a broad assertion about mathematical objects called random graphs — seemed too strong, too all-encompassing, too bold to possibly be true."

"In a recent paper, Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University has settled an 85-year-old conjecture about one of math’s most ancient obsessions: the solutions to polynomial equations such as x2 – 3x + 2 = 0. 'It’s a great problem, famous old question,' said Andrew Granville, a professor at the University of Montreal. '[Bhargava] had an interesting, somewhat different approach, which was very creative.'"

"For more than 250 years, mathematicians have been trying to 'blow up' some of the most important equations in physics: those that describe how fluids flow. If they succeed, then they will have discovered a scenario in which those equations break down — a vortex that spins infinitely fast, perhaps, or a current that abruptly stops and starts, or a particle that whips past its neighbors infinitely quickly."

Seven scholars across all four Schools—Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Historical Studies, and Social Science—have won 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships, one of the most remarkable honors for mid-career researchers, artists, and writers. 

Winners from the...

"Lillian Pierce vividly remembers a moment when she was 4 years old, waiting in her family’s station wagon for her older brother and sister to get out of school, magnolia trees forming pink and white arches overhead. Her mother was sitting in the driver’s seat, writing sequences of numbers in blue ink, balancing her checkbook. Pierce was mesmerized."