Nike Sun

Nike Sun is a probability theorist who works as an associate professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on leave from the department of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She won the Rollo Davidson Prize in 2017. Her research concerns phase transitions and the counting complexity of problems ranging from the Ising model in physics to the behavior of random instances of the Boolean satisfiability problem in computer science.

Education and career

Sun is the daughter of electrical engineer Xiangqun Sun and optoelectronics engineer Minya Zhang, who had both been students at East China Normal University and moved to McMaster University in Canada for their doctoral studies.[1][2]

She graduated from Harvard University in 2009 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in statistics.[3][4] Her senior thesis, Conformally Invariant Scaling Limits in Planar Critical Percolation, was advised by Wilfried Schmid and Yum-Tong Siu.[5] At Harvard, she also helped found the Harvard College Mathematical Review, acting as distribution manager for its first volume.[6]

She spent a year studying for the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge,[4] before completing her doctorate at Stanford University in 2014. Her dissertation, Gibbs measures and phase transitions on locally tree-like graphs, was supervised by Amir Dembo.[3][4][7]

After postdoctoral research at Microsoft Research in New England, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mathematics Department, and as a Simons Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor in 2016. She moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an associate professor in 2018.[3][4]

Recognition

Sun was awarded the Rollo Davidson Prize, given annually to a young probability theorist, in 2017. The award citation credited her research proving the existence of a threshold density such that random k-satisfiability instances whose ratio of clauses to variables is below the threshold are almost always satisfiable, and instances whose ratio is above the threshold are almost always unsatisfiable. The award was given jointly to her and Jian Ding, who coauthored a paper with Sun and Allan Sly describing this result at the 2015 Symposium on Theory of Computing.[8]

She was an invited plenary speaker at the 40th Stochastic Processes and their Applications conference.[9]

References

  1. ↑ Zhang, Minya (1998), Optoelectronic Device Modeling Using Field Simulation Techniques, Doctoral dissertation, McMaster University . See Acknowledgements, p. vi.
  2. ↑ Sun, Xiangqun (2000), Interference Suppression for 121.5/243 MHz SARSAT Signals, Doctoral dissertation, McMaster University . See Acknowledgements, p. vi.
  3. 1 2 3 "Nike Sun", Directory, MIT Mathematics Department, retrieved 2018-09-19
  4. 1 2 3 4 "School of Science welcomes 10 professors: New faculty join the departments of Biology, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences", MIT News, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 19, 2018
  5. ↑ Harvard Mathematics Department Senior Theses, Harvard Mathematics Department, retrieved 2018-09-19
  6. ↑ Harvard College Mathematics Review (PDF), 1 (1), Spring 2007
  7. ↑ Nike Sun at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  8. ↑ "2017 Rollo Davidson Prize Awarded" (PDF), Mathematics People, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 64 (7): 768, August 2017
  9. ↑ "IMS Special Invited Lecturers in 2018", IMS Bulletin, Institute for Mathematical Statistics, December 16, 2017
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