Brown CS Student Mattie Ji Is A Runner-Up For The Schafer Prize For Excellence In Mathematics By An Undergraduate Woman
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on Jan. 19, 2024
Founded in 1971, the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) aims to create a community in which women and girls can thrive in their mathematical endeavors, and to promote equitable opportunity and treatment of women and others of marginalized genders and gender identities across the mathematical sciences. Almost twenty-five years ago, they established the Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize, named for one of their founding members, to be awarded to an undergraduate woman for excellence in mathematics. This year, Brown CS student Mattie Ji, a senior majoring in Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Computer Science, was the prize's runner-up.
Mattie describes her interests as wide, and her knowledge of algebraic geometry and topology has allowed her participation in several Research Experience for Undergraduates programs where she contributed to projects that included an investigation into the relationship between the concepts of Euler characteristic transform (ECT) and smooth ECT, fake projective planes, and the study of a class of conic bundle threefolds. She has a keen interest in coding complex problems and has a repository set up on GitHub displaying her work.
"[Mattie] is consistently described," the AWM writes, "as an outstanding student with the initiative to develop her knowledge and understanding and has an infectious passion for mathematics, with a remarkable record of co-authored papers and conference presentations."
"While this is an award in mathematics," Mattie says, "I would not have gotten this award without the education and experience I have had within the Department of Computer Science. Many of my research projects that helped me garner this award involved various aspects of computational and data science, and I believe that my background and education in Computer Science were very critical for this award."
A full list of this year's winners is available here.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.
