In total, four Georgia Tech faculty are among the 126 individuals selected from a pool of over 1,000 North American researchers nominated this year, including Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena of the School of Materials Science and Engineering and Daniel Genkin of the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy. 

"Sloan Research Fellowships are extraordinarily competitive awards involving the nominations of the most inventive and impactful early-career scientists across the U.S. and Canada,” says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. 

Recipients will receive a two-year $75,000 Fellowship in support of their cutting-edge research. 

“I am thrilled to be a recipient of the Sloan Fellowship this year, and I am thrilled for what can be done with it,” says Blumenthal. “I am immensely grateful for the support of my colleagues and that of SoM at large, without whom this would not have been possible.” 

Blumenthal was also recently awarded an NSF CAREER grant to study chaotic fluid dynamics, one of the most challenging problems in his field. His research focuses on dynamic systems, and their statistical properties.  

Many systems and nature exhibit these seemingly random behaviors — imagine smoke rising from a candle and mixing with the air in a room, or the ripples of cream as they’re swirled into coffee. While extremely difficult to mathematically model and solve, Blumenthal explains that solving these types of problems could lead to innovations ranging from atmospheric modeling and weather predictions, to economics, to creating better salinity profiles in oceans. 

Du is developing quantum sensing and imaging techniques to study quantum materials at very small scales. Quantum materials are a large set of materials that have intriguing, unusual properties, which differ from that of traditional materials.  

“It is my great honor to be elected as a new Sloan Research Fellow in Physics,” Du says. “I appreciate the tremendous support from my colleagues, collaborators, mentors, and team members over my career development. This prestigious grant will support my research on developing state-of-the-art quantum sensing techniques to explore novel quantum materials and electronic devices for next-generation information technology."

She is involved with designing and engineering hybrid quantum devices, which have applications for quantum information. Her research into spintronics is at the forefront of information technology applications. Du was also recently selected for the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program, a distinction given to her for her exceptional potential and creative research. 

Georgia Tech faculty including School of Mathematics faculty Hannah Choi in 2022, Yao Yao in 2020, Konstantin Tikhomirov in 2019, Lutz Warnke in 2018, Zaher Hani in 2016, Jen Hom in 2015, and Greg Blekherman in 2012; along with School of Chemistry's Vinayak Agarwal in 2018, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences' Christopher Reinhard in 2015; and School of Physics’ Tamara Bogdanović in 2013 have previously received Sloan Research Fellowships.

Called “hilarious” by WIRED, Truth Values is also an insightful exploration of the joys and challenges women face in the STEM environment. The story follows NYC Writer/Performer and “Recovering Mathematician” Gioia De Cari’s adventures as a math Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bewitched by the formal mathematical notion of Truth, she struggles with the clash of her personal reality in a world that is not binary.

Winner of a New York International Fringe Festival Overall Excellence Award, the play has been presented at more than 60 theaters and performing arts centers throughout the United States and Canada, including the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, the La Jolla Playhouse, and USC’s celebrated Visions and Voices Arts and Humanities Series, among many others.

“Energetic, intimate, hilarious.” — WIRED

“Funny and insightful…replete with hilarious characters…The story is riveting...go see this show!” —CurtainUp

"Fantastic...pure humor, sadness, intelligence and struggle."–Gigliola Staffilani, Mathematician, Member, National Academy of Sciences

“If you see only one play...about reflexive nonbinary relations, make it this one.” —Los Angeles Times

This free event is sponsored by Gathering 4 Gardner and the Georgia Tech College of Sciences. It is not necessary to attend the Gathering 4 Gardner to reserve a ticket. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. To be assured a seat, please reserve asap.

Levi L. Conant Prize

School of Mathematics Associate Professor Jennifer (Jen) Hom has received the 2024 Levi L. Conant Prize from the AMS. The award recognizes the best expository paper published in either Notices of the AMS or Bulletin of the AMS in the preceding five years. Hom is recognized for her paper, “Getting a handle on the Conway knot,” which was published in the Bulletin in 2021.

“These awards partially signal the depth and breadth of accomplishment and influence of these three remarkable scholars," says School of Mathematics Chair Mike Wolf. "Jen’s tribute is for her how she was able to communicate the clarity of her understanding of fundamental and difficult mathematics to a wide audience, creating a resource that will affect mathematics and mathematicians for many years."

“I am honored to receive the 2024 Levi L. Conant Prize,” Hom says. “An extremely important but often undervalued part of our job as mathematicians is communication, and I’m grateful to the AMS for valuing high-quality exposition in their publications.” 

Hom adds that she’s “proud to be in the company of my esteemed former colleague Dan Margalit,” who won the Conant Prize in 2021. Margalit then served as a Mathematics Professor at Georgia Tech, and is now Stephenson Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Vanderbilt University.

AMS cited Hom’s article as “a wonderful resource for the community on timely and important material,” adding that “Hom’s paper packs a remarkable amount of knot theory into 11 pages, but remains clear, engaging, and easy to read throughout. Readers are left with new understanding and a sense of excitement for the future of this field.”

American Mathematical Society Fellows

Last year, Hom was also recognized as an AMS Fellow for her topology research and service to the mathematical community.

This season, two fellow School of Mathematics faculty, Professor Greg Blekherman and Professor Thang Le, also have joined those ranks.

“Thang and Greg received a distinction reserved for only the top few percent of research mathematicians nationwide," Wolf says. "Thang was singled out for his deep work in the creation and development of the fairly new subject of quantum topology over the last quarter century as well as for that subject’s implications for the very classic area of low-dimensional topology. Quantum topology is now a vast area, but many of its most prominent achievements came about through the work of Thang.

“Greg’s work courses through and blends algebraic and convex geometry as well as combinatorics and optimization — and also mathematical biology," Wolf explains. "Most notably, Greg is known for his diverse and important contributions to the theory of nonnegative and “sum of squares” polynomials, a hugely important topic in contemporary optimization theory.

Blekherman and Le are among more than three dozen mathematical scientists from around the world named 2024 AMS Fellows — a cohort which also includes Kasso Okoudjou, a former School of Mathematics Ph.D. student advised by Professor Christopher Heil. 

“It is my pleasure to congratulate and welcome the new class of AMS Fellows, honored for their outstanding contributions to the mathematical sciences and to our profession,” notes AMS President Bryna Kra. "This year's class was selected from a large and excellent pool of candidates, highlighting the many ways in which our profession is advanced, and I look forward to working with them in service to our community."

“The school is just thrilled by these well-deserved awards to our wonderful colleagues," Wolf added.

About Jennifer (Jen) Hom

Hom joined Georgia Tech as an assistant professor in 2015 after she served as a Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University. She has been an associate professor in the School of Mathematics since 2018. Hom’s research centers on low-dimensional topology, which she usually studies using Heegaard Floer homology. She was asked to speak in the topology section of the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians, the world’s largest gathering of mathematicians. Hom has held a Sloan Fellowship and a Simons Fellowship, is an AMS Fellow, and holds a National Science Foundation CAREER award. 

About Greg Blekherman

Blekherman, who joined Georgia Tech in 2011, is a 2012 recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship. His research interests lie at the intersection of convex and algebraic geometry. Blekherman received his Ph.D. in 2005 from the University of Michigan under the direction of Alexander Barvinok, and he has held postdoctoral positions at the Microsoft Research Theory Group, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, Institute for Pure and Applied Math (UCLA) and UC San Diego before joining Georgia Tech.

About Thang Le

Le received his M.S. and Ph.D. from Lomonosov Moscow State University, and joined Georgia Tech in 2003. His research interests include differential topology, 3-manifolds, knot theory, and quasicrystals. He serves as an editor of Quantum Topology, The Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications, and Acta Mathematica Vietnamica. 

Read the AMS press releases on the 2024 Conant Prize and AMS Fellows here.

Liao was selected as one of the 93 early career scientists from across the country who are receiving a combined $135 million in DOE funding. The awards aim to support the next generation of STEM leaders, and identify early-career scientists whose research will have global impacts. 

Earlier this year, Liao was also selected for an National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award, one of the most prestigious grants that a scientist can receive early in their profession. 

“Supporting America’s scientists and researchers early in their careers will ensure the U.S. remains at the forefront of scientific discovery and develops the solutions to our most pressing challenges,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm, adding that the funding “will allow the recipients the freedom to find the answers to some of the most complex questions as they establish themselves as experts in their fields.”

Model simplification; complex problems

Real-world applications of computer modeling often call for large, complex data simulations, which can be time-consuming and expensive, limiting their applications. Liao’s project “Model Reduction by Deep Learning: Interpretability and Mathematical Advances” focuses on a technique called model reduction, which allows researchers to reduce the size of problems computer models must solve to smaller ones that computers can efficiently solve.

Liao notes that while traditional model-reduction methods have been successful, the technique is mostly limited to low dimensional linear models, or those with fewer important features that the model can include. However, many problems found in nature are the opposite. Liao hopes that by identifying the underlying nonlinear structures in natural problems, she can broaden the application of model-reduction techniques.

To do so, her research will focus on three key questions. First, she will investigate how to leverage deep neural networks to extract low-dimensional nonlinear structures in data sets. Next, Liao will investigate how to use the nonlinear structures in model reduction. Finally, in order to better harness deep learning, Liao aims to develop new deep learning-based model reduction methods.

“This project has the potential to drive significant advances in scientific machine learning,” Liao says in her abstract. “The proposed model-reduction methods can be used to analyze large datasets and simulate complex phenomena in physics, biology, and engineering.”

“It's pretty fun,” she says, looking up from the logic challenge she’s working to solve. “The first test, I was racking my brain trying to think of answers. But I really like these activities, because I have to think outside the box for a lot of them.”

This year, organizers with the School of Mathematics took a similar approach to reimagining and promoting the event — the first one held in person since Covid hit in 2020.

Formerly called High School Math Competition Day, a tradition at Georgia Tech since 1958, the annual event is now simply known as High School Math Day. Some 250 students, parents, and teachers attended this year’s event.

It’s an effort to get more students, including those from historically marginalized and underrepresented communities, thinking about math in a different way, and to have some fun and meet new friends and mentors along the way.

“With the pandemic forcing a pivot in style for the competition, it made sense to relaunch the event in person with different foci and ambitions,” said Michael Wolf, professor and school chair. “Part of the day still revolves around a competition by talented high school students who have learned a lot of math in their schools competing as individuals, but there is plenty of fun and challenging mathematics that does not require a lot of background and can also be done productively in groups.”

With that in mind, the School reimagined the day around a variety of math activities, from group sessions and an algebra exam, to logic-based games and puzzles. 

In one early afternoon session, School of Math graduate students were giving a mini-lecture on combinatorics, the field of math that deals with counting, arranging, and combining numbers. In another part of the room, students were lined up playing chess, Sudoku, board games, and puzzles.

“They don’t have stuff like this at other competitions,” said Yinuo Song, an 11th grader at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. “I'm personally more into this type of logic stuff than algebra. So I think it's pretty fun to expand my knowledge and interest.”

Song also learned about how mathematics is involved in how nature chooses its shapes. Wolf enjoyed giving that presentation to the attendees. “And there was an amazing early afternoon scene with hundreds of students in Clough gathered around tables working on problems as a team,” Wolf said. “This is modern mathematics in action.”

The attendees came from 42 schools around the state. High School Math Day organizers were determined to boost the numbers of students from a broader stretch of communities. “We wanted to broaden the appeal, make this a more inclusive event,” said Trevor Gunn, Ph.D. student in the School of Mathematics and Math Day co-organizer along with Evelyne Smith-Roberge and Wade Bloomquist, both visiting assistant professors. “We advertised to majority-minority counties in the area. And Atlanta is a very diverse region.”

“We tried to advertise to schools that we normally haven’t advertised to,” added Lea Marzo, Program Operations Director for the College of Sciences’ Center for Promoting Inclusion and Equity in the Sciences (C-PIES), who also worked in School of Mathematics outreach for over eight years before joining the newly created C-PIES earlier this year. “I’ve noticed that there are more students of color here than in the past.”

Teacher Anu Krishna brought four of her students from Cambridge High School in Alpharetta. A first-timer to High School Math Day, Krishna was impressed with the campus and the way the event was organized.

“I wanted to bring the students who have actually loved this experience to go back and explain it better,” she said. “But we do have a bunch of other members who will probably represent us next time. I’m looking forward to that.”

Wolf added that the High School Math Day rebranding also resulted in some attendance growth, “and a lot of fun — for a lot of students. Going forward, we hope the word gets out and we are able to grow the participation to as many high schools as we can, with activities that are accessible and inspiring to high school students of any age, and with any mathematical background.

“After all, for every person, there is a math problem that is fun for them to engage with and then make their own.”