MIT mathematicians receive honors for 2023

Members of the Department of Mathematics community — including faculty, students, and alumni — were recognized for their achievements at the recent 2023 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston. Professor Tom Mrowka and his Harvard University collaborator Peter Kronheimer received the 2023 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research, awarded by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) , for their joint paper “Gauge Theory for Embedded Surfaces.”The AMS’ 2023 Joseph L. Doob Prize was awarded to Professor Bjorn Poonen for his 2017 book “Rational Points on Varieties , ” in the series “Graduate Studies in Mathematics.” The citation called his book “an essential reference for anybody who wishes to apply the tools and techniques of modern algebraic geometry to the venerable area of Diophantine equations.”Professor Scott Sheffield and former MIT postdoc and instructor Jason P. Miller, now at the University of Cambridge, have been awarded the AMS’ 2023 Leonard Eisenbud Prize in Mathematics and Physics. They earned this award “for their monumental series of papers on Liouville Quantum Gravity.”CLE Moore instructor Jia Shi received the Association for Women in Mathematics’ Dissertation Prize for her thesis that “proves major results on two separate topics in fluid mechanics, a hard classical field.”The association also honored two MIT seniors who were nominees for the Alice T. Schafer Prize for excellence in mathematics by an undergraduate woman: Anqi Li was the 2023 runner-up, and Ilani Axelrod-Freed earned an honorable mention. Letong Carina Hong ’22, currently at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar for China, received the 2023 AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student, for proving a number of results and solving conjectures in combinatorics, number theory, and probability. The Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics went to Rutgers University Associate Professor Nataša Šešum PhD ’04 and Panagiota Daskalopoulos of Columbia University “for groundbreaking work in the study of ancient solutions to geometric evolution equations.”