Two Harvard Graduate Students Awarded Inaugural Simons Dissertation Fellowship in Mathematics

Earlier this month, the Simons Foundation announced the inaugural recipients of its Simons Dissertation Fellowship in Mathematics. Among the graduate student names were those of Harvard’s own Anda-Sorana Tenie and Matthew King. The fellowship—named in honor of foundation co-founder Jim Simons—provides research support to exceptional graduate students in mathematics in the final fourth and fifth year of their Ph.D. program.

Tenie’s research is in algebraic geometry, particularly in singularities, derived categories, birational geometry, and deformation theory. Her recent work established Reider-type theorems for singular surfaces using Bridgeland stability conditions. “I’m currently thinking about criteria under which higher-dimensional singular Calabi-Yau varieties are smoothable,” Tenie said.

King’s research in arithmetic statistics is concerned with counting number fields. Some fundamental results in this area count how many S3, S4, or S5 number fields there are of discriminant less than X, asymptotically as X goes to infinity. More recently, these counting results were upgraded from counting extensions of Q to counting extensions of an arbitrary number field F. “In my research, I have found that the existing counting methods have error terms which grow exponentially in disc(F), and I have shown how to count in a different way and obtain error terms which are polynomial in disc(F),” King said. “I am currently working on optimizing these new error terms in order to facilitate applications to other problems in arithmetics statistics.”

Both graduate students are honored and grateful to be selected for the fellowship. They plan to use part of the flexible funding it offers to travel, learning and collaborating with fellow mathematicians around the world. Tenie and King also took the opportunity to acknowledge the guidance they’ve received from their advisors—professors Mihnea Popa and Melanie Matchett Woord, respectively—as well as the wider support of their friends, classmates, and the Harvard Department of Mathematics.

The Simons Foundation is an in-perpetuity foundation committed to the founder’s vision of supporting mathematics and basic science. Learn more about the Simons Dissertation Fellowship in Mathematics and how to apply here.