Research Highlights

African Diaspora Joint Mathematics Workshop

SLMath - January 2022

The African Diaspora Joint Mathematics Workshop (ADJOINT) is a yearlong program that provides opportunities for U.S. mathematicians, especially those from the African diaspora, to form collaborations with distinguished African American research leaders on topics at the forefront of mathematical and statistical research.

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Fluid Dynamics

SLMath - January 2022

Fluid dynamics is a broad area of research that has been the subject of mathematical investigation for hundreds of years, inspired by but not limited to practical applications in biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering.

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Institute for Advanced Study researcher mines polynomial patterns in dense sets

IAS - November 2021

Sarah Peluse has spent the past few years looking for patterns in numbers. Specifically, she’s been looking for polynomial progressions, which involve sequences of numbers with a fixed common ratio plus a fixed value (x, x + y, x + y2), such as 3, 3 + 3, 3 + 32. Prior work had proved that once a set of numbers gets big enough, it reliably contains these polynomial progressions. But nobody knew just how big exactly.

Reduced basis approaches to speed up kinetic transport simulations

ICERM - November 2021

Linear kinetic transport equations play a critical role in optical tomography, radiative transfer and neutron transport. The physical and velocity/angular variables that the solution depends on are 6-dimensional, and the problem is inherently multiscale in nature. These features hamper the efficient and accurate numerical simulation of such problems. As part of ICERM’s Spring 2020 program on Model and dimension reduction in uncertain and dynamic systems, Yanlai Chen, Yingda Cheng, Fengyan Li, and Zhichao Peng joined together to work on a reduced order model approach that would allow efficient and robust simulations of linear kinetic transport equations.

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Decision Making in Health and Medical Care

IMSI - October 2021

New models are challenging old norms for how regulatory bodies oversee the drug discovery process and approve much needed new therapies. Importantly, I-SPY 2 and now GBM AGILE, are prototypes for drug platform trials for COVID-19, Alzheimer’s Disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, and other diseases. Modern statistical methods, and new computational learning and decision-making tools are contributing to a hopeful future for those stricken with deadly and debilitating diseases.

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Math & Racial Justice

SLMath - September 2021

In response to the groundswell of support for racial justice initiatives following the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a White police officer in Minnesota, this workshop addressed algorithmic bias; fair division, allocation, and representation; public health disparities; and racial inequities in mathematics education.

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Squeezing data with the power of algorithms

IAS - May 2021

Two computer scientists determine the smallest amount of data needed to estimate the mean When two fields of study collide, advances that were once all but unimaginable can be realized. At least that’s what two computer scientists showed when they applied the algorithmic tools of their field to solve the statistics problem of how to accurately guess the average value of a phenomenon from as few...

Eccentric binary black hole surrogate models for the gravitational waveform and remnant properties: comparable mass, non-spinning case

ICERM - April 2021

Black holes are fascinating objects! They become more so when two of them merge. Merging black holes radiate energy in the form of gravitational waves (GWs). GWs then propagate intergalactic distances to reach Earth. Ground-based detectors operated by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo are capable of detecting such signals. Detection of GWs can help us to...

Eccentric binary black hole surrogate models for the gravitational waveform and remnant properties: comparable mass, non-spinning case Thumbnail Image

Gravitational hair for extreme Kerr black holes using a GPU-accelerated mixed-precision WENO method

ICERM - March 2021

A breakthrough discovery was made that a special kind of black hole violates black hole uniqueness, the so-called “no hair” theorem. Specifically, a computational study of extremal black holes — holes that are “saturated” with the maximum charge or spin they can possibly carry — found that there is a quantity that can be constructed from the spacetime curvature at the black hole horizon that is...

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Orbital dynamics of binary black hole systems can be learned from gravitational wave measurements

ICERM - March 2021

The collision of massive compact objects, such as black holes (BHs) or neutron stars, emit an immense amount of energy in the form of gravitational waves. With the advent of advanced gravitational-wave detectors, such as the NSF-funded Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), we are now able to directly observe gravitational waves. Encoded in these waves are information about...

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