Mathematics

"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."

By Alex Kontorovich, Member (2009–10, 2013–14, 2016) and von Neumann Fellow (2017–18) in the School of Mathematics: 

"Not long ago, I was asked to explain the so-called Langlands program in a single tweet. Impossible, I immediately thought. It’s one of the biggest, most sweeping projects in mathematics, capable of connecting distant realms of research and, naturally, fiendishly difficult to describe."

Current Veblen Research Instructor Sarah Peluse has been awarded the 2022 Dénes König Prize for the paper "Bounds For Sets With No Polynomial Progressions." The honor is presented to an early-career scholar for outstanding research in discrete mathematics. 

The 2022 Women and Mathematics (WAM) program took place from May 21–27, bringing together 40 students, educators, and researchers from universities around the world to participate in a series of lectures, problem sessions, research seminars, and special talks around the theme “The Mathematics of Machine Learning.” The program returned to campus for the first time since 2019 after being postponed in 2020 and held remotely in 2021.

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."