Research News

Not everything needs to be seen to be believed; certain things are more readily heard, like a train approaching its station. In a recent paper, published in Physical Review Letters, researchers have put their ears to the rail, discovering a new...

"Widely separated binary systems take more than a thousand years to complete a single orbit, making it challenging to measure the eccentricity of an individual system. Instead, Hsiang-Chih Hwang used a statistical technique to study nearly a million binary systems at once."

"Last July, two mathematicians from Durham University, Will Hide and Michael Magee, confirmed the existence of a much sought-after sequence of surfaces: each more complicated than the last, ultimately becoming so intricately connected with themselves that they nearly reach the limits of what’s possible."

"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."

Update (06/17/2022): This research is now published in Astrophysical Journal Letters and can be accessed here.

Looks can be deceiving. The light from an incandescent bulb seems steady, but it flickers 120 times per second. Because the brain only perceives an average of the information it receives, this flickering is blurred and the perception of constant illumination is a mere illusion.

"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."

Past Member (2020–21) Jinyoung Park, a Szegö Assistant Professor at Stanford University, and Huy Tuan Pham, a Stanford Ph.D. student, proved the Kahn-Kalai Conjecture, a central problem in probabilistic combinatorics.

A cross-discipline analysis of ancient genomes by a team of geneticists, archaeologists, and historians from institutions across Europe, Asia, and North America—with Professor Emeritus Patrick Geary as one of four principal investigators—has answered questions about the mysterious Avar population whose origins have remained enigmatic for 1,400 years. 

"In a nearly 400-page paper posted in March, the mathematicians Mohammed Abouzaid and Andrew Blumberg of Columbia University have constructed a major extension of one of the biggest advances in geometry in recent decades."