Associate Professor Caroline Klivans is awarded the Research Achievement Awards

Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, Brendan Keith, is breathing new life into old math. He is trying to update vintage techniques with a method he names proximal Galerkin. Known as finite element methods, assist researchers like Keith to predict how objects might behave in different environments.

The Association for Women in Mathematics is pleased to announce that the 2024 Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics will be awarded to Zoë Batterman, a senior mathematics and statistics major at Pomona College and Arianna Meenakshi (Meenakshi) McNamara, a senior mathematics and physics major at Purdue University. Mattie Ji, a senior at Brown University majoring in Mathematics-Computer Science and Applied Mathematics has been named as Runner-up.

The awards will be presented during the Joint Prize Session on Wednesday, January 3, 2024 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco. A full press release is posted here: https://awm-math.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/PR-Schafer-2024.pdf. The full citations of the selection committee along with responses from the winners are posted here: https://awm-math.org/awards/schafer-prize-for-undergraduates/schafer-prize-2024/.

In 1990, the Executive Committee of the AWM established the annual Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman. The prize is named for Alice T. Schafer (1915–2009), one of the founders of AWM and its second president, who contributed greatly to women in mathematics throughout her career.

At Brown, Keith leads a research team using numerical analysis and optimization principles to develop computer algorithms and data-driven mathematical models. He uses these tools, or numerical methods, to tackle challenging engineering problems written as partial differential equations, which are equations used to model physical systems mathematically and whose solutions lie in the infinite-dimensional spaces of functions.

The Rhode Island Israel Collaborative (RIIC) in collaboration with the Division of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Brown University, held a conference on the accelerating development of AI. AI is expanding to almost every field, from high performance computing to farming. Researchers, developers and enthusiasts are producing innovative solutions based on AI for many problems. The conference brought together top expert speakers in AI from Israel and Rhode Island to present the latest innovations in the field.

In a new study in Nature Computational Science, the scientists describe how they combined statistical algorithms — which need less data to make accurate, efficient predictions — with a powerful machine learning technique developed at Brown and trained it to predict scenarios, probabilities and sometimes even the timeline of rare events despite the lack of historical record on them.

Presenting at the International Congress of Mathematicians can for many, be a career-defining moment. This year ICM 2022 will take place from July 6 to the 14th. Three Brown faculty members will have the honor of presenting their work. Kavita Ramanan, Professor of Applied Mathematics, will speak on "Interacting Processes on Sparse Random Graphs." For more information please visit https://www.brown.edu/news/2022-07-06/icm-2022.

Professor Hongjie Dong is a recipient of a mid-Career Research Achievement Award. Professor Dong is a leading expert in the field of partial differential equations which help to analyze the laws of physics and engineering. He has developed novel tools to analyze elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations, and applies his expertise to the theories of composite materials, fluid dynamics and kinetic theory.

The smallest state in the country has two centers of world-class mathematics. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) are both located in Providence, RI. The AMS publishes many research journals, and maintains an electronic database called MathSciNet, among many other services. ICERM's mission is to solidify the relationship between mathematics and computation.

Professor Oanh Nguyen was honored with a Salomon Award for her research work regarding the limited distribution for the number of real roots. The goal of her research is to study fundamental problems concerning the distribution of roots of random polynomials and random functions. This is Professor Nguyen's first year as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics here at Brown.

Kavita Ramanan, Professor of Applied Mathematics, uses randomness as a powerful tool to make predictions about complex systems. These systems range from statistical physics to communication networks which exist in the world around us. The tool of randomness can even help to determine the spread of infectious diseases. Ramanan states that in our world randomness shows itself as an incomplete understanding of complex systems. However, randomness can enable, even those things which might be computationally impossible, useful predictions about things that are not fully understood.