News Flash September

2022 New Frontiers Prize awarded to MIT mathematicians

New Frontiers Prize was established in honor of Fields medallist Maryam Mirzakhani in 2019 to support and uplift budding and young female mathematicians.

Yilin Wang, an MIT instructor, will be receiving the award for her “innovative and far-reaching work on the Loewner energy of planar curves,” according to the award citation.

Hong Wang, an assistant professor of mathematics at the UCLA and MIT alumnus, earned the accolade “for advances on the restriction conjecture, the local smoothing conjecture, and related problems,” according to the citation.

Ages old Group Classification problem cracked

In 1989 mathematicians Harvey Friedman and Lee Stanley wrote a paper digging into the complexities of classifications some of the countable structures which are considered easier to deal with than uncountable sets. They raised a problem on the classification of a particular set in the infinite torsion-free abelian groups (or TFABs) in the said paper.

University of Turin mathematician Gianluca Paolini and Saharon Shelah of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem finally solved the problem after a long wait of 30 years.

With the law of isomorphism, the code to the problem was cracked.

New solutions discovered for century-old astrophysics problem

Bernese theoretical astrophysicist Kevin Heng attained solutions to a problem needed to calculate light reflections from planets and moons paving way for ease in research in planetary atmospheres.

Taking guidance from previous work in the world including that of Indian mathematician Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Heng worked upon his mathematical solutions for the strength of reflection (the albedo) and the shape of the phase curve. He completed all the calculations manually and then cross verified with the computer shocking to find the preciseness of the solutions and their validity for all laws of reflection.

Why eggs look like eggs? Secret unveiled by mathematics

With the incorporation of mathematics in biology, researchers have finally devised a universal equation that can be applicable to any kind of egg of any bird. The steps serve as a crucial development in going deep into evolutionary adaptations of the most abundant force in nature.

The researchers have found the new universal mathematical formula for egg shape is based on four parameters: egg length, maximum breadth, the shift of the vertical axis, and the diameter at one-quarter of the egg length.

A very large leap in the fields of Biology and technology, this is could serve as a turning point in the study of evolution and the peculiarities of nature.