Rutgers Math Alum Jinyoung Park (PhD'20) who is currently a mathematician at Stanford, has been awarded 2023 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes, given by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. The $50,000 prize is awarded to outstanding early-career women in the field of mathematics. The award is named for Iranian mathematician, Fields Medalist, and Stanford Professor Maryam Mirzakhani, who passed away from breast cancer in 2017.
Park is the Szegö Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Her research interests fall within the field of discrete mathematics, which covers mathematical structures that are distinct and separable, and often countable. Park’s specific interests are extremal and probabilistic combinatorics, asymptotic enumeration, and graph theory.
“I’m extremely honored to receive this prize, and I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all of my collaborators,” said Park. “I’m particularly grateful to my academic advisor Jeff Kahn, and my postdoc mentors Jacob Fox and Avi Wigderson for their guidance and support. I also would like to thank my husband and daughter for their love and support.”
Park was awarded Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize for “contributions to the resolution of several major conjectures on thresholds and selector processes.” Those problems concern determining the precise point where a phase transition – an abrupt change in physical properties – happens, and apply to a large variety of systems. For example, water’s structure changes drastically at the point when it reaches 0 degrees.
For full article, please visit: https://news.stanford.edu/report/2022/09/23/maggie-miller-jinyoung-park-win-maryam-mirzakhani-new-frontiers-prizes/
