Math Dept Welcomes Four Professors

The Department of Mathematics welcomes this year two new senior faculty members, Wei Zhang and Zhiwei Yun, and two junior faculty members, Giulia Saccà and Yufei Zhao.

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  Wei Zhang is a number theorist who works in arithmetic geometry.  He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2009 under Shouwu Zhang, took a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, and was a professor at Columbia University.  He is the recipient of the 2010 SASTRA Ramanujan prize. Together, Zhiwei Yun and Wei Zhang have made some exciting progress toward the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture in number theory, by characterizing higher derivatives of L-functions in the number field case.

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  Zhiwei Yun’s work is in representation theory, number theory, and algebraic geometry, and specifically the Langlands program. He received his PhD from Princeton University under Bob MacPherson in 2009, was a CLE Moore Instructor at MIT, and held faculty positions at Stanford and Yale. He is a Packard Fellow and received the 2012 SASTRA Ramanujan prize. He will start at MIT in the spring.

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  Giulia Saccà is an algebraic geometer. She received her PhD from Princeton University under Gang Tian in 2013, and has held positions at the Institute for Advanced Study and at Stony Brook University. Giulia is currently teaching 18.725, Algebraic Geometry.

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  Yufei Zhao works in extremal, probabilistic, and additive combinatorics. He received his MIT PhD under Jacob Fox in 2015, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford. Yufei is currently teaching the Putnam seminar 18.A34 and Graph Theory and Additive Combinatorics, 18.S997.

Welcome!

Chenyang Xu awarded Future Science Prize

Chenyang Xu, an algebraic geometer who will join our Department as Full Professor in Fall 2018, will receive the 2017 Future Science Prize in Mathematics & Computer Science at a ceremony in Beijing on October 29, 2017. He is being recognized for his contributions to birational algebraic geometry.

The purpose of the Future Science Prize is to reward scientists that have made outstanding contributions to science and technology in Greater China. It is referred to as China's new Nobel Prize. This non-governmental prize was established last year in Life Science and in Physical Science, but Chenyang wins the inaugural Future Prize in Mathematics & Computer Science.

Congratulations, Chenyang!

Minicozzi, Sheffield, and Pixton awarded chairs

Bill Minicozzi and Scott Sheffield have been awarded senior faculty chairs, and Aaron Pixton has received a Career Development chair, as of this past July 1.

Bill Minicozzi now holds the Singer Professorship in Mathematics, a chair that was recently held by Tom Mrowka, and previously by Dan Stroock. This was established by the James and Marilyn Simons Professorship Fund in 1999, in honor of Institute Professor and Abel Prize winner Isadore Singer. Formerly named the Simons Distinguished Professorship of Mathematics until Professor Singer’s retirement, it was renamed in 2010.

Scott Sheffield has been awarded the Leighton Family Professorship in Mathematics, a chair previously held by Michel Goemans. The chair was established in 2007 by the Leighton Family Fund.

Both chairs are for five years, renewable once.

Aaron Pixton has received the Class of 1957 Career Development chair for a three-year term. This is an Institute chair for a junior faculty member.

Congratulations Bill, Scott, and Aaron!

ICM 2018 speakers include Tom Mrowka, Bjorn Poonen, Alex Postnikov, Chenyang Xu, Zhiwei Yun, and Wei Zhang

Tom Mrowka will deliver a plenary address at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2018, which will be held August 1-9, 2018, in Rio de Janeiro.

Other MIT math faculty invited to speak at ICM 2018 include Bjorn Poonen and our new full professor Wei Zhang in the Number Theory section; new professors Zhiwei Yun and Chenyang Xu in the Algebraic and Complex Geometry section; and Alex Postnikov in the Combinatorics section. Meeting every four years, ICM is where the Fields medals are awarded.