Undergraduate Prizes and Awards 2022-2023
Congratulations to this year’s prize and award recipients!
Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize
From the estate of Thomas T. Hoopes, Class of 1919, Harvard received a fund from which to grant annual awards to undergraduates on the basis of outstanding scholarly work or research.
Recipients of the prize with a concentration in mathematics are:
Silvia Casacuberta Puig for her project entitled “Finding Simple Models of Complex Objects: From Regularity Lemmas to Algorithmic Fairness”—supervised and nominated by Professor Salil P. Vadhan.
Benjy Firester for his project entitled “Mostow Rigidity and Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds”—supervised and nominated by Professor Curt McMullen.
Jason Zhou for his project entitled “Data Quality Always Matters: An Analysis of Data Quality for Finite Population Z-estimators”—supervised and nominated by Professor Xiao-Li Meng.
David B. Mumford Undergraduate Mathematics Prize
From the income of the gift in 1997 of Peter L. Falb, A.B. 1957, A.M. 1957, Ph.D. 1961 to establish the David B. Mumford Undergraduate Mathematics Prize, to be given annually to the most promising senior concentrator in mathematics, provided such concentrator is outstanding.
The prize goes to Benjy Firester.
Robert Fletcher Rogers Prize
From the income of the gift in 1921 of the late Robert Fletcher Rogers, A.B. 1886, there have been established a first prize and second prize to be awarded annually to the College students who present the best talks before the Mathematics Table during an academic year. In making the awards, emphasis is laid primarily on the excellence of the oral presentation. It is not essential that the material presented is original, but mastery of the subject and adaptation of the presentation is regarded as important. The prizes are awarded by the Department of Mathematics on the recommendation of the Mathematics Table.
First place goes to Madison Shirazi for a talk on “Finding Balance in Chaos: Approximating Orthogonal Polynomials on Julia Sets”.
Second place goes to Silvia Cascuberta Puig for a talk on “Finding Simple Models of Complex Objects: From Regularity Lemmas to Algorithmic Fairness”.
Honorable mentions go to Janna Withrow, Mark Pekala, William Hu, and Peter Chon for a group presentation on “Lean into Theorem Proving”.
Friends Prize
The prize is shared by Benjy Firester and Madison Shirazi.
Herb Alexander Prize
Each year, this award recognizes a deserving student who will use the money for research and travel to math conferences.
The prize goes to Silvia Casacuberta Puig.
Captain Jonathan Fay Prize
The Fay Prize was established in 1907 by Joseph Storey Fay in memory of his great-grandfather, Captain Jonathan Fay (1724–1800), to be awarded to the graduating Radcliffe student most deserving due to academic and personal merit: one whose “scholarship, conduct, and character has given evidence of the greatest promise among her contemporaries.” This year’s Fay Prize recipients are recognized for their exceptional undergraduate work in the humanities, natural sciences, and social science. Their work was selected from among that of 74 Harvard College seniors, each of whom received the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for their excellent undergraduate theses.
The recipient of the prize with a concentration in mathematics is Sílvia Casacuberta Puig.
Wister Prize in Mathematics or Music
From a bequest of Charles J. Wister, a prize is awarded in alternate years to the senior concentrating in Mathematics or Music who has the highest record in his or her field of concentration.
The recipient of the prize with a concentration in mathematics is Raphael Tsiamis.