MIT Department of Mathematics

Last updated

The Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (also known as Course 18) is one of the premier mathematics departments both in the U.S. and the world. [1] [2] In the 2023 U.S. News & World Report rankings of the U.S. graduate programs for mathematics, MIT's program is ranked in the first place, tied only with that of Princeton University, and thereafter it is a three-way tie between Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. [3]

Contents

The current faculty of around 50 members includes Wolf Prize winner Michael Artin, Shaw Prize winner George Lusztig, Gödel Prize winner Peter Shor, and numerical analyst Gilbert Strang.

History

Originally under John Daniel Runkle, mathematics at MIT was regarded as service teaching for engineers. [4] Harry W Tyler succeeded Runkle after his death in 1902, and continued as its head until 1930. Tyler had been exposed to modern European mathematics and was influenced by Felix Klein and Max Noether. [5] Much of the early work was on geometry.

Norbert Wiener, famous for his contribution to the mathematics of signal processing, joined the MIT faculty in 1919. By 1920, the department started publishing the Journal of Mathematics and Physics (in 1969 renamed as Studies in Applied Mathematics ), a sign of its growing confidence; the first PhD was conferred to James E Taylor in 1925.

Among illustrious members of the faculty were Norman Levinson and Gian-Carlo Rota. George B. Thomas wrote the widely used calculus textbook Calculus and Analytical Geometry, known today as Thomas' Calculus. Longtime faculty member Arthur Mattuck received several awards for his teaching of MIT undergraduates.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Felix Klein</span> German mathematician (1849–1925)

Felix Christian Klein was a German mathematician and mathematics educator, known for his work in group theory, complex analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and the associations between geometry and group theory. His 1872 Erlangen program classified geometries by their basic symmetry groups and was an influential synthesis of much of the mathematics of the time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mathematics education</span> Teaching, learning, and scholarly research in mathematics

In contemporary education, mathematics education—known in Europe as the didactics or pedagogy of mathematics—is the practice of teaching, learning, and carrying out scholarly research into the transfer of mathematical knowledge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dirk Jan Struik</span>

Dirk Jan Struik was a Dutch-born American mathematician, historian of mathematics and Marxian theoretician who spent most of his life in the U.S.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karen Uhlenbeck</span> American mathematician

Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck ForMemRS is an American mathematician and one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. She is currently a distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven Strogatz</span> American mathematician

Steven Henry Strogatz, born August 13, 1959, is an American mathematician and author, and the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for his work on nonlinear systems, including contributions to the study of synchronization in dynamical systems, and for his research in a variety of areas of applied mathematics, including mathematical biology and complex network theory.

Mathematics education in Australia varies significantly between states, especially at the upper secondary level. While every school offers a state-based education systems, some may also offer the International Baccalaureate program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ravi Vakil</span> Canadian-American mathematician

Ravi D. Vakil is a Canadian-American mathematician working in algebraic geometry.

The Faculty of Science is one of eleven faculties at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, Canada. With roots tracing back to 1843, the Faculty currently offers several undergraduate and graduate programs ranging from Earth Sciences to Mathematics to Neuroscience. Notable alumni of the Faculty of Science include several astronauts and Nobel Prize winners.

George Brinton Thomas Jr. was an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at MIT. Internationally, he is best known for being the author of the widely used calculus textbook Calculus and Analytic Geometry, known today as Thomas' Calculus.

Edwin Bidwell Wilson was an American mathematician, statistician, physicist and general polymath. He was the sole protégé of Yale University physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs and was mentor to MIT economist Paul Samuelson. Wilson had a distinguished academic career at Yale and MIT, followed by a long and distinguished period of service as a civilian employee of the US Navy in the Office of Naval Research. In his latter role, he was awarded the Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the highest honorary award available to a civilian employee of the US Navy. Wilson made broad contributions to mathematics, statistics and aeronautics, and is well-known for producing a number of widely used textbooks. He is perhaps best known for his derivation of the eponymously named Wilson score interval, which is a confidence interval used widely in statistics.

Judith Victor Grabiner is an American mathematician and historian of mathematics, who is Flora Sanborn Pitzer Professor Emerita of Mathematics at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges. Her main interest is in mathematics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Nan McKenzie Laird is the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of Public Health, Emerita in Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She served as Chair of the Department from 1990 to 1999. She was the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Biostatistics from 1991 to 1999. Laird is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, as well as the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is a member of the International Statistical Institute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mathematics education in the United States</span> Overview of mathematics education in the United States

Mathematics education in the United States varies considerably from one state to the next, and even within a single state. However, with the adoption of the Common Core Standards in most states and the District of Columbia beginning in 2010, mathematics content across the country has moved into closer agreement for each grade level. The SAT, a standardized university entrance exam, has been reformed to better reflect the contents of the Common Core. However, many students take alternatives to the traditional pathways, including accelerated tracks. As of 2023, twenty-seven states require students to pass three math courses before graduation from high school, while seventeen states and the District of Columbia require four. A typical sequence of secondary-school courses in mathematics reads: Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Pre-calculus, and Calculus or Statistics. However, some students enroll in integrated programs while many complete high school without passing Calculus or Statistics. At the other end, counselors at competitive public or private high schools usually encourage talented and ambitious students to take Calculus regardless of future plans in order to increase their chances of getting admitted to a prestigious university and their parents enroll them in enrichment programs in mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven Balbus</span> American astrophysicist (born 1953)

Steven Andrew Balbus is an American-born astrophysicist who is the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford and a professorial fellow at New College, Oxford. In 2013, he shared the Shaw Prize for Astronomy with John F. Hawley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William G. McCallum</span>

William G. McCallum is a University Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and was Head of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona from 2009 to 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Taalman</span> American mathematician

Laura Anne Taalman, also known as mathgrrl, is an American mathematician known for her work on the mathematics of Sudoku and for her mathematical 3D printing models. Her mathematical research concerns knot theory and singular algebraic geometry; she is a professor of mathematics at James Madison University.

Rhonda Lee Hatcher is an American mathematician whose research topics include analytic number theory and L-functions as well as topics in recreational mathematics. She is an emeritus associate professor of mathematics at Texas Christian University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Princeton University Department of Mathematics</span>

The Princeton University Department of Mathematics is an academic department at Princeton University. Founded in 1760, the department has trained some of the world's most renowned and internationally recognized scholars of mathematics. Notable individuals affiliated with the department include John Nash, former faculty member and winner of the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences; Alan Turing, who received his doctorate from the department; and Albert Einstein who frequently gave lectures at Princeton and had an office in the building. Fields Medalists associated with the department include Manjul Bhargava, Charles Fefferman, Gerd Faltings, Michael Freedman, Elon Lindenstrauss, Andrei Okounkov, Terence Tao, William Thurston, Akshay Venkatesh, and Edward Witten. Many other Princeton mathematicians are noteworthy, including Ralph Fox, Donald C. Spencer, John R. Stallings, Norman Steenrod, John Tate, John Tukey, Arthur Wightman, and Andrew Wiles.

Sherman Kopald Stein is an American mathematician and an author of mathematics textbooks. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis. His writings have won the Lester R. Ford Award and the Beckenbach Book Prize.

References

  1. "Vital Statistics on the Numbers Game". Archived from the original on 2003-10-04. Retrieved 2012-05-06.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link), Vital Statistics on the Numbers Game, Science Watch, May 2002. Archived at "Vital Statistics on the Numbers Game". Archived from the original on February 15, 2012. Retrieved 2012-05-06.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  2. "MIT is second in the US on number of Math PhDs". Archived from the original on 2021-04-22. Retrieved 2008-02-19.
  3. "Mathematics Rankings". U.S. News & World Report.
  4. Peter L. Duren, Richard Askey, Uta C. Merzbac, A Century of Mathematics in America, 1989, American Mathematical Society, ISBN   0-8218-0124-4
  5. Parshall, Karen; Rowe, David E. (1994). The Emergence of the American Mathematical Research Community 1876–1900: J. J. Sylvester, Felix Klein, and E. H. Moore. AMS/LMS History of Mathematics 8. Providence/London. pp. 229–230. ISBN   9780821809075.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)