Friends of the Institute: Impact

"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."

"In 2013, one of the best—but also one of the worst—things that can happen to a mathematician happened to James Maynard. Fresh out of graduate school, he solved one of the discipline’s oldest and most central problems, about the spacing of prime numbers."

Joetha Collier, a young Black woman, was killed by a white man in 1971, near the Mississippi town where Emmett Till was murdered. Keisha N. Blain, Member in the School of Social Science, asks why isn’t her case known nationally today.

Measuring the mass of a galaxy cluster is difficult—clusters cannot be “weighed” by placing them on a scale. Digvijay Wadekar, current Member in the School of Natural Sciences, has worked to develop an AI program to identify new variables that might make inferring the mass from other observable quantities more accurate.

Mimi Dai, von Neumann Fellow in the School of Mathematics and associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, has received the AMS Centennial Fellowship for the 2022–2023 academic year.

In a new study of axion motion, researchers, including Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Member Keisuke Harigaya, propose a scenario known as “kinetic misalignment” that greatly strengthens the case for axion/dark matter equivalence. 

Eben Kirksey, American anthropologist and current Member in the School of Social Science, will embark on a three-year research project titled “The Promise of Justice,” with funding announced today by the Australian Research Council.

Kirksey will work...