Congratulations to Jennifer Balakrishnan for her election as a Fellow of AMS citing her “contributions to arithmetic geometry and computational number theory and service to the profession.”
Jennifer Balakrishnan will receive the 2022 AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory in recognition of outstanding contributions to explicit methods in number theory, particularly her advances in computing rational points on algebraic curves over number fields. The award will be presented at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle. See the AWM press release for more details.
In May 2021, The Simons Foundation notified the Simons Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation that it was approved for renewal funding. The $6M ensures that the pure math research collaboration between Boston University, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and MIT will continue through August 2024.
Congratulations to Alex Best, who recently finished his PhD at Boston University under the supervision of Jennifer Balakrishnan. He will start a postdoctoral position at VU Amsterdam in July 2021, working with Sander Dahmen as part of the project “New Diophantine Directions.” In Fall 2022, Alex will then take up a Heilbronn Research Fellowship at King’s College London.
Work of David Lowry-Duda, collaboration research scientist based at Brown, was featured by the 2021 Bridges exhibition at the Joint Mathematics Meetings. He has been developing new visualization tools for modular forms.
“On a question of Mordell” by Andrew Booker (Bristol) and collaboration PI Andrew Sutherland has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. See MIT’s press release for how these solutions were found with the help of half a million home computers.
Collaboration PI Bjorn Poonen and affiliated researcher Kiran Kedlaya, with Alexander Kolpakov and Michael Rubinstein, have classified all tetrahedra with rational dihedral angles. This resolves a 1976 question of J.H. Conway and A.J. Jones. The solution is a tour-de-force of computational arithmetic geometry and requires solving a polynomial equation with 105 terms! Their preprint “Space vectors forming rational angles” is now on the arXiv; see their press release for more details.
Congratulations to collaboration PI Andrew Sutherland, one of 46 members of the 2021 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society! He was recognized “for contributions to number theory, both on the theoretical and computational aspects of the subject.”
The Royal Society has announced its Dorothy Hodgkin Fellows for 2020. Among them is Dr. Celine Maistret who is affiliated with the Simons Collaboration based at Boston University. Dr. Maistret’s research lies in Number Theory, the branch of mathematics concerned with studying numbers and solving equations. Read the full announcement.
For millennia, mathematicians have wondered whether odd perfect numbers exist, establishing an extraordinary list of restrictions for the hypothetical objects in the process. Insight on this question could come from studying the next best things. “Proving that something exists is easy if you can find just one example,” said John Voight, a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth. “But proving that something does not exist can be really hard.” Read more in Quanta.
Edgar Costa and David Roe, two of the research scientists working at MIT as part of the Simons Collaboration in Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation, recently created and launched what is now known as researchseminars.org. It was originally intended to provide a crowd-sourced place for the mathematics community to quickly and easily find scientific seminars that were virtually adapted due to COVID-19 social interaction and travel restrictions. It has since expanded to include other fields such as physics, biology, and computer science. Read more about this effort in MIT News.
Andrew Sutherland, one of the research scientists working at MIT as part of the Simons Collaboration in Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation, recently co-hosted a virtual panel discussion, “Mathematics research online: hosting virtual events.” The panelists were made up of conference organizers who had early experience pivoting in-person talks to a virtual platform at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. A video recording of the panel discussion, as well as Q&A and poll results collected during the session, are all available for review.