A rendering of the TIGER facility at Princeton University that was approved by the local planning board in May.
A Princeton resident has filed a lawsuit challenging the local planning board’s approval of Princeton University’s plan to build a geothermal facility next to a nursery school and close to a residential neighborhood.
Helen Nissenbaum, the spouse of a university professor, is the plaintiff in the lawsuit. She is being represented by local lawyer Bruce Afran, who also represented Nissenbaum and her husband, mathematician Peter Sarnak, during the planning board’s hearings on the geothermal facility earlier this year.
N.J. mathematician who changed how we use computers splits $880K top math prize
Updated Mar 17, 2021;
Posted Mar 17, 2021
Avi Wigderson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was named a recipient of the 2021 Abel Prize along with László Lovász, a former visiting professor at the institute. (Dan Komoda | Institute for Advanced Study)
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Two mathematicians whose complex work in pure mathematics has led to real world changes in how we use computers were awarded the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics Wednesday, capping off their extraordinary careers.
Avi Wigderson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and László Lovász, of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, were named the 2021 winners of the Abel Prize. The award from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters is considered the top yearly prize in the field because the Nobel Prize does not have a mathematics category.
Art by Karen Lin.
On a snowy February evening, thirty undergraduates gather inside a brightly lit classroom on the first floor of Leet Oliver Memorial Hall. At the front of the room is Hee Oh, the Abraham Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Yale, drawing crisp white circles on the board with a brand-new stick of Hagoromo chalk. By the time she turns around, she has traced out three perfect circles, each touching two others at a single point.
Oh studies Apollonian circle packings, which are created by filling the space between three mutually tangent circles with successively smaller tangent circles. As she draws the smaller circles on the board, she talks about her fascination with circle packings, connecting them to centuries-old theorems of Greek geometers and to recent developments in hyperbolic geometry. The students listen with undivided attention, captivated by her every word.