Mathematics People

Ferrini-Mundy Named to National Science Board

Math educator Joan Ferrini-Mundy was one of eight new members named to the National Science Board, announced by President Biden on October 15, 2024.

Ferrini-Mundy is the 21st president of the University of Maine and its regional campus, the University of Maine at Machias. She is also vice chancellor for research and innovation for the University of Maine System. Prior to her presidency, Ferrini-Mundy was the chief operating officer of the National Science Foundation (NSF), after six years spent leading NSF’s Directorate for Education and Human Resources.

An active leader in the math community, Ferrini-Mundy is the immediate past chair of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) and a member of the Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics (TPSE) Board.

The National Science Board was established via 1950 legislation that created the National Science Foundation. Working with the NSF Director, the Board helps determine the NSF’s strategic direction. It also serves as an independent body of advisors to both the president and Congress on policy matters related to science and engineering, including education in science and engineering. The Board consists of 25 members, appointed by the president, who serve six-year terms; one-third are appointed every two years.

—AMS Communications

MIT Undergraduates Earn Davidson Fellows Scholarships

Michelle Wei and Linus Tang, both students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), were named Davidson Fellows Scholarship winners in mathematics for 2024.

Wei received a $25,000 scholarship. For her research, she designed a second-order cone programming (SOCP) algorithm and mathematically proved a bound on its worst-case runtime. SOCP is a crucial class of problems in mathematical optimization, used to optimize linear objective functions under specific constraints, with broad applications in industries such as energy, transportation, and finance.

Tang received a $10,000 scholarship for a project focused on online learning, a type of machine learning where predictions are made from a continuous stream of data. He explored how to adapt online learning models to function effectively even under adverse conditions where the feedback provided to the learner is weak. By studying various scenarios, Tang developed methods to modify standard algorithms for these challenging conditions and quantified the difficulty of learning based on the worst-case number of incorrect predictions. This research has applications in areas such as weather modeling and social media content recommendation.

The Davidson Fellows Scholarships are granted by the Davidson Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Reno, Nevada, which supports profoundly gifted youth. The institute awards 20 annual college scholarships of $50,000, $25,000, or $10,000 each to students 18 or younger who have completed significant projects that have the potential to benefit society in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, literature, and music. Since its inception in 2001, the Davidson Fellows Scholarship has provided more than $9.9 million in scholarship funds to 448 students.

—Davidson Institute

Dittrich Awarded 2024 CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics

Bianca Dittrich, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, was awarded the 2024 CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics by the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) and Centre de recherches mathématiques (CRM).

Dittrich was honored “in recognition of her important contributions to our understanding of the problem of observables in quantum gravity, and for her advancement of spin foam approaches to quantum gravity,” according to a press release.

The annual CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics was first introduced in 1995, on the 60th anniversary of the CAP. The objective of this award is to recognize research excellence in the fields of theoretical and mathematical physics.

—Canadian Association of Physicists

Duchin Moves to Cornell

Moon Duchin, a mathematician and public policy expert who has advised numerous US states on redistricting and whose lab has been at the forefront of an emerging discipline that merges data science and elections, has joined Cornell University.

Duchin, who founded the MGGG Redistricting Lab in the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, is now a member of the faculty of the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the Department of Mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and is affiliated with the Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society as part of the provost’s Data Science Radical Collaboration initiative.

A prominent voice on fair redistricting who has developed mathematical models to analyze the potential and actual outcomes of changes to policy and voting districts, Duchin has served as an expert in redistricting litigation in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Alabama, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Georgia. Her research focuses on discrete geometry and randomized models with applications to the study of voting and democracy.

“Mathematical data science is my home, but I have made a deep investment in taking in the interdisciplinary literature and understanding the legal and policy frameworks that have informed redistricting over time, because you are never going to solve these problems through pure math,” Duchin told a Cornell publication. “Brooks and Cornell really offer me the perfect platform to deepen the understanding of how we can use data science to make democracies more responsive to citizens.”

—Cornell University Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy