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-- -- Search -- Main menu Skip to primary content Skip to secondary content Menu -- -- Programs Workshops SQuaREs Problem Lists AIM Preprint Series Five Year Fellows Projects Math Communities Global Math Project Math Teachers’ Circles Morgan Hill Math Alliance of Indigenous Math Circles Julia Robinson Math Festival REUF Mathematics of Planet Earth Open Textbook Initiative UTMOST Math Careers Advice Knowls Library Books Reprints Online Resources AIM Preprint Series Videos Visitors Map Directions The AIM Facility Restaurant Guide Travel Restrictions Child Care FAQ About Contact AIM’s Mission Staff Governance Diversity History Future AIM Home News News Stories Newsletter Donate Home This week: July 13-17, 2020 AIM and the Math Teacher Circle Network are currently hosting a free online workshop for teachers nationwide. Stream the live session More information on the workshop The American Institute of Mathematics stands in solidarity with the Black community and with peaceful protesters across the nation and the world in outrage, grief, and despair over the brutal police killing of George Floyd and many other Black individuals before him. We believe that mathematics is a fundamental human endeavor, and we reaffirm AIM’s commitment to diversity and inclusion as essential to the health and development of our discipline. For many of us, the beauty of mathematics often provides a silent refuge from the chaos of the world. Let us not retreat from this moment, however, but instead commit to draw upon the power of mathematics as we work together to bring about systemic change and greater justice in our society. AIM Summer School on Dynamics, Data and the COVID 19 Pandemic Dates: June 22-July 31, 2020 Nearly forty graduate students and advanced undergraduates will be participants in an online summer program on the mathematics of this critical and timely topic. Students will learn the basic mathematical epidemiology underlying the models used in studying COVID19. Faculty: Linda Allen (Texas Tech), James Broda (Bowdoin), Pauline van den Driessche (UVic), Hans Engler (Georgetown), John Gemmer (Wake Forest), Hans Kaper (Georgetown), Richard McGehee (Minnesota), Jack O’Brien (Bowdoin), Nancy Rodriguez (CU-Boulder), Christian Sampson (UNC-Chapel Hill), Mary Silber (Chicago), Erik Van Vleck (Kansas), Jianhong Wu (YorkU), Abdul-Aziz Yakubu (Howard) and Mary Lou Zeeman (Bowdoin). Program Director: Christopher Jones (UNC-Chapel Hill) ckrtj@renci.org For more information Math activities for students, teachers, families–just about everyone! AIM’s Math Communities website has a new calendar of upcoming math activities you can take part in. Covid update Monday, July 6, 2020 All workshops through August 29 have been rescheduled, postponed, or canceled. See the Workshop Changes below for the new dates. All registered participants should have received more information via email. All SQuaREs scheduled through the end of July have been postponed. All participants have been sent further information via email about rescheduling. AIM staff continues to monitor the evolving conditions. We will update this page as needed to respond to changes. Additional information is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Santa Clara County Public Health . Workshop Changes Mathematics of topological insulators March 16-20, 2020, Columbia University Postponed, dates to be determined. Arithmetic reflection groups and crystallographic packings March 16-20, 2020 Rescheduled for December 14-18, 2020. Special holonomy and branes March 30-April 3, 2020 Rescheduled for October 26-30, 2020. Resurgence in string and gauge theory May 4-8, 2020 Canceled. Equivariant techniques in stable homotopy theory May 11-15, 2020 Rescheduled for April 26-30, 2021. Random walks beyond hyperbolic groups June 1-5, 2020 Rescheduled for May 3-7, 2021. Delta symbols and the subconvexity problem June 15-19, 2020 Rescheduled for November 2-6, 2020. Moduli spaces for algebraic dynamical systems July 13-17, 2020 Rescheduled for September 27-October 1, 2021. Automated production of Braille textbooks August 3-7, 2020 Postponed, dates to be determined. Algorithmic randomness August 10-14, 2020 Postponed, dates to be determined. Upcoming Workshops The Albertson conjecture and related problems August 31-September 4, 2020 Ehrhart polynomials: inequalities and extremal constructions September 14-18, 2020 All Upcoming Workshops Math that feels good Creating learning resources for blind students Martha Siegel, Professor Emerita from Towson University in Maryland, was working with a blind student who needed a statistics textbook for a required course. The Braille version of the textbook required six months to prepare, a delay which caused the student a significant delay in her studies. Siegel reached out to Al Maneki, a retired NSA mathematician who is blind, and the two of them decided to do something about it. Focusing on math textbooks initially, Siegel and Maneki pulled together a collaborative team intent on solving the problem. “We were shocked to realize there did not already exist an automated method for producing mathematics Braille textbooks,” said Alexei Kolesnikov, a colleague of Siegel at Towson University and member of the team. Read more… Presentation of the 2019 Alexanderson Award The American Institute of Mathematics has awarded the second annual Alexanderson Award. This award is given in honor of Gerald Alexanderson, Professor of Mathematics at Santa Clara University and founding chair of AIM’s Board of Trustees. The Alexanderson Award recognizes outstanding research articles arising from AIM research activities that have been published within the past three years. Receiving this year’s award are Paul Bruillard, Siu-Hung Ng, Eric C. Rowell, and Zhenghan Wang for their paper “Rank-finiteness for modular categories” published in the Journal of the American Mathematics Society in 2016. The award was presented at the Alexanderson Award Ceremony and Lecture on the evening of October 4, 2019, in the Recital Hall of Santa Clara University. The lecture was given by Jordan Ellenberg, engaging author of the book How Not to Be Wrong . More about the award Video of the award ceremony and lecture Exploring the Mathematical Universe A team of more than 80 mathematicians from 12 countries is charting the terrain of rich, new mathematical worlds, and sharing their discoveries on the Web. The “L-functions and Modular Forms Database ( www.LMFDB.org )” started more than 5 years ago with funding to AIM from the National Science Foundation . The project has just announced its official release, providing a new and powerful tool for students and researchers in several areas of mathematics. Read more… NET Maps It is human nature to try to classify things–that is, to sort them into organized types. Many of the central problems in mathematics are problems of classification of various types of related mathematical objects. The classification of finite groups, for example, was a landmark accomplishment of the last century, and the classification of manifolds continues to challenge topologists. The AIM SQuaRE “The global dynamics of Thurston’s pullback map” with participants, William Floyd, Gregory Kelsey, Sarah Koch, Russell Lodge, Walter Parry, and Kevin Pilgrim, sought to classify the particular dynamical systems known as nearly Euclidean maps . The late mathematician William Thurston studied—among many other things—dynamical systems resulting from repeated iteration of a mapping from the two-dimensional sphere to itself. Applying a mapping over and over again, and watching what happens to a point, can produce fantastic and beautiful patterns that are intriguing to mathematicians. He focused on some particularly nice ones, the Euclidean Thurston maps , which are fully understood and classified using the tools and concepts of linear algebra. But much less well-understood is the much larger family of nearly Euclidean Thurston (NET) maps —th...