2024 MPS Annual Meeting

Richard Carthew
Northwestern University

Predictability in Phenotypic Variation of Organismal Form

Living systems exhibit remarkable fidelity in form (morphology) when comparing individual organisms from the same species or closely related species. And yet variation in form exists between individuals, enabling evolution by selection. However, geometric study of form has been limited by the quantitative measures of morphology that typically rely on a sparse number of handpicked anatomical landmarks. We have developed an application of Riemann’s mapping theorem to measure variation in morphology of the common fruit fly wing. 2D images of wings are conformally mapped to a unit disc and aligned with one another to produce a global registration of wing images. Studying an outbred population of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, we find natural variation is spatially extended across the wing and is strongly correlated along a single mode of variation as determined by PCA.

Remarkably, minute perturbations in environment or genome sequence shift the population’s average wing morphology along the 1D manifold regardless of the qualitative features of the perturbation. The average wing phenotypes of three other species in the melanogaster clade are also positioned along the manifold, and the distances between one another and D. melanogaster strongly reflect their inferred phylogenetic relationships. Theoretical work suggests that evolvable variation in wing morphology might be driven by a “soft mode” in the dynamical system that corresponds to wing development. Carthew will also discuss recent topological analysis of wing form that provides a different perspective to the correlated variation.

Richard Carthew is the Owen L. Coon Professor of Molecular Biosciences at Northwestern University. Born and raised in Toronto Canada, he received a Ph.D. in biology at MIT. After a postdoctoral stint at University of California, Berkeley, he held a faculty position at University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Northwestern University in 2001. He is the inaugural director of the NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, which was established in 2023 and is located in Chicago. His primary research focus is on the patterns of shape and form in complex animals. More specifically, the self-organization of cells during development that create complex forms with remarkable predictability. He was also a pioneer in elucidating the mechanisms whereby small RNA molecules are capable of regulating gene expression across the Eukaryota (nucleus-bearing cellular life). Carthew is a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow and a Pew Biomedical Scholar.

Jonathan Feng
University of California, Irvine

The Fall and Rise of Forward Physics

Particle colliders have been the workhorse tool for particle physics since they were invented over 60 years ago. Forward particles are those that are produced at colliders and then travel in a direction close to the beamline. For decades, forward particles were largely ignored, and all of the large detectors currently operating at colliders are blind to them. In the last few years, however, our understanding of the forward region has been transformed and we now know that this region contains a treasure trove of physics, including the most energetic neutrinos ever produced by humans, possible evidence for dark matter, milli-charged particles, and new forces, and a wealth of other valuable information. To capture some of this potential, the Forward Search Experiment (FASER) has been operating in the forward region of the Large Hadron Collider since 2022. FASER’s latest results will be described, along with their implications for the future of particle physics.

Jonathan Feng is Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at University of California, Irvine. His research spans topics in particle and astroparticle physics, and he is known as a central figure in the theoretical study of particle dark matter and searches for new particles. In recent years, he has also led an experiment at CERN, the Forward Search Experiment (FASER), which he founded in 2018. Feng received degrees in physics and mathematics from Harvard, Cambridge, and Stanford. He joined the UC Irvine faculty in 2002 and became Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow in 2006. Feng’s research has been supported by awards from the National Science, Sloan, Guggenheim, Heising-Simons, and Simons Foundations.

Aaron Lauda
University of Southern California

New Interactions Between Topology and Quantum Computation

The field of topological quantum computation promises to provide scalable and robust models for quantum computation, leveraging the unique properties of topological phases of matter. Central to this approach is the existence of exotic particles known as anyons, which exhibit non-Abelian exchange statistics. These particles offer a pathway to fault-tolerant quantum computing, where information is stored and manipulated in a way that is inherently protected from local perturbations.

This talk will introduce the interplay between topology and quantum computation, focusing on how recent advances in our understanding of topology can provide new theoretical techniques for quantum computation. We will delve into the rich mathematical framework that predicts the existence of anyons and their associated braiding operations, which form the foundation of topological quantum gates. Additionally, we will discuss how advances in topology, such as the study of knot invariants and topological quantum field theories, have provided new tools and insights for quantum computation.

Aaron Lauda is a professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California, studying representation theory, low-dimensional topology and their applications in mathematics and theoretical physics. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and is a member of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology. He completed his Ph.D. in pure mathematics in 2006 at Cambridge University, following a master’s degree in Physics from University of California, Riverside. He spent five years as a Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University before joining USC in 2011. Lauda is a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship and an NSF CAREER award and is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the Simons Foundation. From 2017–2020, he directed an NSF Focused Research Grant supporting a collaboration involving a team from USC, UCLA, Caltech and Columbia. In 2021, he was awarded a D.Sci from Cambridge University. Currently, he is directing the Simons Collaboration in Mathematical and Physical Sciences New Structures in Low-Dimensional Topology.

Lin Lin
University of California, Berkeley

Quantum Advantage in Scientific Computation?

The advent of error-corrected quantum computers is anticipated to usher in a new era in computing, with Shor’s algorithm poised to demonstrate practical quantum advantages in prime number factorization. However, cryptography problems are typically not categorized as scientific computing problems. This raises the question: which scientific computing challenges are likely to benefit from quantum computers? Lin Lin will first discuss some essential criteria and considerations towards realizing quantum advantages in these problems. Lin will then introduce some recent advancements in quantum algorithms, especially for simulating open quantum system dynamics. The first half of the presentation is intended to be accessible to a broad audience without prior background in quantum computation.

Lin Lin is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at University of California, Berkeley and a faculty scientist in the Mathematics Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research centers on solving quantum many-body problems by employing both classical and contemporary methods. These techniques prove valuable across various domains, including quantum chemistry, quantum physics, materials science and quantum information theory. He has received the Sloan Research Fellowship (2015), the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2017), the Department of Energy Early Career award (2017), the (inaugural) SIAM Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) early career award (2017), the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (2019), the ACM Gordon Bell Prize (Team, 2020) and the Simons Investigator in Mathematics award (2021).

Joel Moore
University of California, Berkeley

The Evolving Boundary Between Classical and Quantum Hardware for Studying Low-Dimensional Quantum Matter

One of the first nontrivial examples of quantum matter to be understood at equilibrium was the behavior of a chain of two-state spins, or qubits, entangled by nearest-neighbor interactions. Hans Bethe’s solution of the ground state in 1931 eventually led to the concept of Yang-Baxter integrability, and the thermodynamics were fully understood in the 1970s. However, the dynamical properties of this spin chain at any nonzero temperature remained perplexing until some unexpected theoretical and experimental progress beginning around 2019. Starting from this and other spin models, which appear in magnetic solids known as “Mott insulators,” Joel Moore will talk about how new atomic emulators and quantum computers are beginning to complement solid-state experiment and theory. Moore will also explain why computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians all have their own reasons to care about the dynamics of simple arrangements of quantum spins.

Joel Moore is Chern-Simons Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His work in theoretical physics studies quantum matter with a focus on the remarkable phenomena that emerge as consequences of entanglement and topology. He received his A.B. in physics from Princeton University in 1995 and spent a Fulbright year abroad before graduate studies at MIT. He then was a postdoc at Bell Labs before joining the Berkeley faculty in 2002. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2022), a Simons Investigator (2013–2023) and a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2013). He previously served as member and chair of the advisory board of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Elizabeth Paul
Columbia University

Advances in Optimization for Stellarator Design

A stellarator confines plasma with asymmetric toroidal magnetic fields for fusion energy applications. The immense freedom in the stellarator design space provides opportunities for reducing engineering complexity and improving performance. Although the magnetic field may be far from symmetric, modern stellarators take advantage of “hidden symmetries” for enhanced confinement. This talk will provide an overview of recent advances in stellarator optimization and their application to the design of new experiments in the Columbia Plasma Laboratory. The Columbia Stellarator eXperiment (CSX) will build on the success of the Columbia Non-neutral Torus (CNT) to confine a small aspect ratio quasisymmetric plasma with two shaped interlinked coils. Using this device, we will explore the physics of quasiaxisymmetry and demonstrate non-insulated HTS technology for non-planar magnets.

Elizabeth Paul joined the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University as an assistant professor in 2023. She leads a group of postdocs and students in stellarator theory and computation. Her team works to develop software for numerical optimization of new devices and advance modeling of energetic particles in 3D magnetic fields. Paul received her A.B. in astrophysical sciences with concentrations in applied and computational mathematics and applications of computing from Princeton University in 2015. In 2020, she received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2021, Dr. Paul received the Marshall N. Rosenbluth Award from the American Physical Society in recognition of her doctoral work, “For pioneering the development of adjoint methods and application of shape calculus for fusion plasmas, enabling a new derivative-based method of stellarator design.” Prior to joining Columbia University, she was a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. In 2023, she received the DOE Early Career Research Award.

Richard Schwartz
Brown University

The Optimal Paper Moebius Band

A paper Moebius band is made by taking a 1 x L rectangular strip of paper, giving it an odd number of twists, and joining the ends together. The question is: How small can you make L? Richard Schwartz will explain why L>sqrt(3) is a necessary and sufficient condition. This resolves a question about the optimal paper Moebius band raised in 1962 by W. Wunderlich, and confirms the more specific conjecture made in 1977 by B. Halpern and C. Weaver.

Richard Evan Schwartz (b. 1966) is the Chancellor’s Professor of Mathematics at Brown University. He received a math B.S. from University of California, Los Angeles in 1987 and a math Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1991. He spoke at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002 and 2022. He wrote and illustrated a number of picture books, one of which (You Can Count on Monsters) briefly made it to number one on Amazon.com. Schwartz is happiest when he has a lot of free time. His hobbies include drawing, coding, cycling and yoga.

Monica Visan
University of California, Los Angeles

The Benjamin-Ono Equation

The Benjamin-Ono equation is an effective model for interfacial waves in fluids. The case of fresh water floating upon salt water is a common laboratory configuration. It also appears in nature, for example, as ice melts into fjords. Like its shallow-water cousin, the Korteweg-de Vries equation, the Benjamin-Ono equation is completely integrable; however, it has proven more resistant to mathematical methods. After describing this model and its integrable structures, we will explain the method of commuting flows we introduced for establishing optimal well-posedness results for completely integrable models and its implementation in the context of the Benjamin-Ono equation.

Monica Visan is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, working in dispersive partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, and completely integrable systems. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Bucharest in 2002 and received her Ph.D. degree from UCLA in 2006.  After spending two years as a member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and one year as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, she joined the UCLA faculty in 2009.

Professor Visan received a Clay Liftoff Fellowship in 2006. In 2010, she was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship, as well as a Harrington Faculty Fellowship at the University of Austin, Texas. She received the Sorgenfrey Distinguished Teaching Award from UCLA in 2018. In 2023, together with her co-author Rowan Killip, Professor Visan was awarded the Frontiers of Science Award at the International Congress of Basic Science for her work on the Korteweg-de Vries equation. In 2024, she was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and awarded a Simons Fellowship in Mathematics.

The foundation encourages invitees to attend the MPS Annual Meeting in person. For those who cannot attend the meeting in NYC, a remote participation option will be available via registration.

Air & Rail
The foundation will arrange and pay for round-trip air or train travel to the conference as well as up to three nights hotel accommodations and reimbursement of local expenses. Business-class or premium economy airfare will be booked for all flights over five hours when within budget.

All travel and hotel arrangements must be booked through the Simons Foundation’s preferred travel agency.

Travel specifications, including preferred airline, will be accommodated provided that these specifications are reasonable and within budget.

Travel arrangements not booked through the preferred agency, including triangle trips and routing/preferred airlines outside budget, must be pre-approved by the Simons Foundation and a reimbursement quote must be obtained through the foundation’s travel agency.
All costs related to changes made to ticketed travel are to be paid for by the participant and are not reimbursable. Please contact the foundation’s travel agency for further assistance.

Personal & Rental Cars
Personal car and rental trips over 250 miles each way require prior approval from the Simons Foundation via email.

Rental cars must be pre-approved by the Simons Foundation.

The Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel offers valet parking. Please note there are no in-and-out privileges when using the hotel’s garage, therefore it is encouraged that participants walk or take public transportation to the Simons Foundation.

Hotel
Participants who require accommodations are hosted by the foundation for a maximum of three nights at the Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel, arriving on Wednesday, October 16 and departing on Saturday, October 19. Any additional nights are at the attendee’s own expense. Please submit your accommodation requirements via registration.

Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel
112 W 25th Street
New York, NY 10010
(between 26th and 7th Avenues)
https://www.marriott.com/en-gb/hotels/travel/nycmm-renaissance-new-york-chelsea-hotel/

Overview:
In-person participants will be reimbursed for meals and local expenses including ground transportation. Expenses should be submitted through the foundation’s online expense reimbursement platform after the meeting’s conclusion.

Expenses accrued as a result of meetings not directly related to the Simons Foundation-hosted meeting (a meeting held at another institution, for example) will not be reimbursed by the Simons Foundation and should be paid by other sources.

Below are key reimbursement takeaways; a full policy will be provided with the final logistics email circulated approximately 2 weeks prior to the meeting’s start.

Meals:
The daily meal limit is $125; itemized receipts are required for expenses over $24 USD. The foundation DOES NOT provide a meal per diem and only reimburses actual meal expenses up the following amounts.

• Breakfast $20
• Lunch $30
• Dinner $75

Allowable Meal Expenses

• Meals taken on travel days (when you traveled by air or train).
• Meals not provided on a meeting day, dinner on Friday for example.
• Group dinners consisting of fellow meeting participants paid by a single person will be reimbursed up to $75 per person and the amount will count towards each individual’s $125 daily meal limit.

Unallowable Meal Expenses

• Meals taken outside those provided by the foundation (breakfast, lunch, breaks and/or dinner).
• Meals taken on days not associated with Simons Foundation-coordinated events.
• Minibar expenses.
• Meal expenses for a non-foundation guest.
• Ubers, Lyfts, taxis, etc., taken to and from restaurants in Manhattan.
• Accommodations will be made for those with mobility restrictions.

Ground Transportation:
Expenses for ground transportation will be reimbursed for travel days (i.e. traveling to/from the airport or train station) as well as subway and bus fares while in Manhattan are reimbursable.
Transportation to/from satellite meetings are not reimbursable.

Attendance
In-person participants and speakers are expected to attend all meeting days. Participants receiving hotel and travel support wishing to arrive on meeting days which conclude at 2:00 PM will be asked to attend remotely.

COVID-19 Vaccination
Individuals accessing Simons Foundation and Flatiron Institute buildings must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Entry & Building Access
Upon arrival, guests will be required to show their photo ID to enter the Simons Foundation and Flatiron Institute buildings. After checking-in at the meeting reception desk, guests will be able to show their meeting name badge to re-enter the building. If you forget your name badge, you will need to provide your photo ID.

The Simons Foundation and Flatiron Institute buildings are not considered “open campuses” and meeting participants will only have access to the spaces in which the meeting will take place. All other areas are off limits without prior approval.

If you require a private space to conduct a phone call or remote meeting, please contact your meeting manager at least 48-hours ahead of time so that they may book a space for you within the foundation’s room reservation system.

Guests & Children
Meeting participants are required to give 24 hour advance notice of any guests meeting them at the Simons Foundation either before or after the meeting. Outside guests are discouraged from joining meeting activities, including meals.

With the exception of Simons Foundation and Flatiron Institute staff, ad hoc meeting participants who did not receive a meeting invitation directly from the Simons Foundation are not permitted.

Children under the age of 18 are not permitted to attend meetings at the Simons Foundation. Furthermore, the Simons Foundation does not provide childcare facilities or support of any kind. Special accommodations will be made for nursing parents.