2026 MPS Annual Meeting

Alexei Borodin
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

How Quantum Integrability Shapes Random Geometry

The Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ) universality class has organized our understanding of (1+1)-dimensional random growth for over 40 years. Only recently did mathematicians succeed in describing its complete, universal large-scale space-time fluctuation field, now known as the Directed Landscape. The goal of this talk is to explain how quantum integrability — a profound algebraic framework originally developed in physics for entirely different purposes — provides a beautiful and unexpected mathematical path from classical combinatorics to this universal limit.

Tracing this journey from Ulam’s classic longest increasing subsequence problem, we will see how commuting difference operators and the Yang–Baxter equation serves as hidden engines of exact solvability. Remarkably, repeated applications of the Yang–Baxter equation induce a radical geometric transformation: they convert the bulk behavior of (1+1)-dimensional non-equilibrium stochastic dynamics into the edge behavior of 2-dimensional equilibrium Gibbsian line ensembles. Under KPZ scaling, this spatial equilibrium is rigid enough to single out a unique limiting line ensemble — and with it, an explicit geometric characterization of the Directed Landscape.

Alexei Borodin is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studies problems on the interface of representation theory and probability that link to combinatorics, random matrix theory, and integrable systems. His most recent work carries over the ideas and techniques of the theory of symmetric functions to solvable lattice models of statistical physics.
 

Emily Carter
Princeton University

From Quantum Embedding to Transfer Learning for Sustainability Science

For nearly two decades, Emily Carter has put her theoretical physical chemistry expertise to work on research problems aimed at helping mitigate climate change and its disastrous effects, most recently to help develop a circular carbon economy. Carter’s lecture will feature selected examples from quantum-based, multiphysics, multiscale computer simulations that provide accurate thermodynamics, kinetics, dynamics, and insights into carbon dioxide conversion into chemical feedstocks, fuels, and mineral carbonates, by means of light or electricity as energy sources instead of conventional fossil-fuel-derived heat. The theoretical work starts, as nearly all such simulations do today, with standard density functional theory (DFT). However, there are a range of phenomena where pure DFT is unsuitable because of inherent (self-interaction, delocalization) errors in the (necessarily approximate) DFT exchange-correlation functionals. These phenomena include ones critical to chemical conversions of concern here: photochemistry, electron transfer, reactions of ions in solution, etc. Such theoretical limitations have continuously motivated her group’s development of new quantum-mechanics-based methods over multiple decades. Here, a divide-and-conquer strategy is used, going beyond DFT using our density functional embedding theory (DFET) and embedded correlated wavefunction (ECW) theory to refine DFT predictions. DFET delivers a unique, exact interaction (embedding) potential between subsystems, typically comprised of a region of interest and its surroundings. That embedding potential then replaces the extended environment, allowing for a refined description of the region of interest with ECW theory. Because ECWs incorporate exact exchange and dynamic correlation, they overcome pure DFT’s various limitations so that all the phenomena mentioned above can be treated properly. Beyond quantum-level simulations, DFET/ECW theory can improve DFT-based machine-learned force fields through transfer learning, thereby enabling longer time, larger length scale atomistic dynamics simulations with substantially improved accuracy, as will be illustrated.

Time permitting, Carter will also briefly mention a Simons Foundation initiative she helped launch and lead, on solar radiation management science — the science of aerosol-cloud-light interactions — as another climate intervention strategy we may need to consider in the years ahead.

Emily A. Carter is the inaugural Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Applied & Computational Mathematics program at Princeton University. Carter earned a B.S. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in physical chemistry from the California Institute of Technology, followed by a brief postdoc at University of Colorado, Boulder. She spent 16 years on the chemistry faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) before moving to join Princeton’s mechanical and aerospace engineering and applied and computational mathematics faculty for the next 15 years. She was founding director of Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, then Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied science, then rejoined UCLA as executive vice chancellor and provost, and as distinguished professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, before returning to Princeton’s faculty and joining the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory as senior strategic advisor and member of its executive management team in 2022. Carter maintains an active research presence, developing and applying quantum mechanical simulation techniques to enable discovery and design of materials and processes for sustainable production of fuels, chemicals, and materials. The author of nearly 500 publications and patents, a devoted mentor to over 100 students and postdocs, Carter has delivered over 600 invited, keynote, and plenary lectures worldwide, and serves on boards and works with foundations spanning a wide range of disciplines. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Inventors, National Academy of Engineering, European Academy of Sciences, and Great Britain’s Royal Society.
 

Giorgio Gratta
Stanford University

Testing Gravity at Ever Shorter Scale: A Trip into Exotic Experimental Physics

Since the times of Henry Cavendish and John Mitchell, the strength of gravity has been measured by comparing it to the reaction of a calibrated mechanical spring. While in the last 60 years planetary measurements (with natural and artificial bodies) have provided remarkable accuracy at large distance, measurements in the lab have continued to rely various incarnations of the good old mechanical springs, in many cases resulting in superb experiments and results.

In this talk, Gratta will explore several drastically different techniques recently developed specifically to tackle the short distance regime, where many theories suggest something exotic may be happening. This will be a trip into atomic, molecular, and optical physics and high-resolution nuclear spectroscopy. While science results are gradually appearing, he hopes to convince the audience that, as is often the case with new techniques, a new and exciting array of questions and applications are also emerging!

Giorgio Gratta is an experimental physicist interested in pushing the boundary of fundamental knowledge. After postdoc work on collider physics, since 1995 he has been active in neutrino physics: first leading some of the experiments observing neutrino oscillations and later pioneering some of the searches for neutrinoless double-beta decay. In the last decade, Gratta has also initiated a program to test the inverse square law of gravity at progressively shorter distances.
 

June Huh
Princeton University

A Decomposition Theorem for Lefschetz Modules

The decomposition theorem of Beilinson, Bernstein, Deligne, and Gabber is among the deepest known facts about the topology of complex projective varieties. For a map from a smooth complex projective variety X to a projective variety Y, the theorem imposes strong structural constraints on the cohomology H(X) as an H(Y)-module. We show that many of these constraints are linear-algebraic consequences of classically known properties of H(X). By formalizing this structure through the notion of Lefschetz modules, we obtain analogous decomposition statements in settings where the classical decomposition theorem does not apply, such as in combinatorial Hodge theory and for Chow rings modulo numerical equivalence. Joint work with Omid Amini and Matt Larson.

June Huh is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University. His work connects algebraic geometry and combinatorics, bringing geometric ideas to longstanding problems about discrete structures. He received his BS and MS from Seoul National University and his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2014. He previously held appointments at Stanford University (2020–2021), the Institute for Advanced Study (2019–2020), and the Clay Mathematics Institute (2014–2019). His honors include a Simons Investigator Award (2021), a MacArthur Fellowship (2022), and the Fields Medal (2022).
 

Vicky Kalogera
Northwestern University

Toward Trustworthy AI for Astrophysics: Stars, Binaries, and Sky Surveys

Sky surveys continue to reshape astrophysics. The Rubin Observatory’s LSST will soon deliver millions of transient and variable-source alerts each night, revolutionizing time-domain observations across the electromagnetic spectrum and gravitational-wave detections of compact-object mergers. Extracting physics from data of this scale and complexity is a challenge no single method — and no single field — can meet alone. The NSF–Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI) was founded on this premise: a community of astrophysicists and AI researchers advancing both fields in collaboration, pursuing trustworthy AI for problems across all cosmic scales — from neutron stars, black holes and stellar explosions to galaxy evolution, dark matter, and dark energy — through enhanced inference from survey data, AI-accelerated multiscale simulations, and learning-based survey and instrument design, while driving advances in foundational AI itself. Following an overview of this landscape, Kalogera will focus on her group’s work: physics-based deep learning that embeds the equations of stellar structure and evolution into neural solvers, preserving the detailed physics of single and binary stars while enabling the population-scale modeling needed to interpret survey observations of transients and gravitational-wave sources.

Vicky Kalogera’s research focuses on the formation and evolution of compact objects as electromagnetic and gravitational-wave sources. Her work spans modeling, population inference, and the development of data-analysis methods for extracting physical information from gravitational waves and detector characterization. She is a senior member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and recently chaired a national committee guiding the future of ground-based gravitational-wave detectors in the United States. Kalogera directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the NSF–Simons National AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI Institute). Among her honors are the Bethe and Heineman Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and fellowships from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Physical Society. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
 

Zohar Komargodski
Stony Brook University

The Arrow of Scale

Many laws of nature look impossibly complicated up close. A glass of water contains an astronomical number of molecules, a magnet contains countless interacting spins, and the vacuum of quantum field theory is alive with fluctuations at every scale. Yet from far away, these systems often become simple: water flows like a smooth fluid, magnets are described by a few collective variables, and quantum fields organize themselves into universal patterns. The renormalization group is the mathematical language for this miracle of “zooming out”: it keeps what matters at long distances while systematically forgetting microscopic details.

This long-distance viewpoint is also where many of nature’s most striking phenomena appear. Superconductivity, magnetism, fluid flow, phase transitions, and even the particles we observe at low energies are emergent long-distance miracles, born from the collective behavior of many degrees of freedom rather than being obvious in the microscopic equations themselves.

We will discuss how this process of forgetting is not arbitrary, and how it can sometimes be understood as a kind of gradient flow. This reveals a hidden arrow of scale, analogous in spirit to the arrow of time in thermodynamics: quantum field theories cannot flow in circles, cannot recover lost microscopic information, and must become, in a precise sense, simpler in the infrared — while remaining rich enough to account for the macroscopic phenomena we observe.

Zohar Komargodski is a theoretical physicist and professor at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University. His work focuses on quantum field theory and related problems at the interface with condensed matter and statistical physics. Komargodski received his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2008 and was later a postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study before joining the Simons Center. His contributions have been recognized by several awards.
 

Ran Raz
Princeton University

Multi-Prover Games and Parallel Repetition

Multi-prover games are a central notion that has transformed theoretical computer science and led to milestone achievements such as the PCP theorem, delegation of computation, and the theory of hardness of approximation. The same framework also plays a fundamental role in the study of quantum entanglement and has connections to several topics in mathematics.

In a \(k\)-player game, a referee samples \(k\) questions from a publicly known joint distribution and sends the \(i\)th question to the \(i\)th player. Each player returns an answer, with no communication allowed between the players after they receive their questions. The players win if a publicly known predicate of the questions and answers is satisfied. The value of the game is the maximum winning probability achievable by any joint strategy of the players.

In the \(n\)-fold parallel repetition of a multi-prover game, the players try to win \(n\) copies of the original game simultaneously. A long-standing open problem is to prove that for general multi-prover games with value strictly smaller than 1, the value of the \(n\)-fold parallel repetition decays exponentially fast with \(n\).

Ran Raz will introduce multi-prover games and discuss their connections to theoretical computer science, mathematics, and physics, focusing on parallel repetition and its applications, and along the way present some old and new bounds on the value of \(n\)-fold parallel repetition.

Ran Raz is a professor of theoretical computer science at Princeton University. He received his BSc in mathematics and physics and his PhD in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. He was a faculty member at the Weizmann Institute of Science for more than two decades. He has also held visiting professor positions at Microsoft Research and at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Raz’s research is in computational complexity theory, a mathematical field that studies the resources needed to solve computational problems and the relationships between different models of computation. His work focuses on proving lower bounds for computational models, and spans Boolean and algebraic circuit complexity, communication complexity, randomness and derandomization, probabilistically checkable proofs, interactive proof systems, and quantum computation and communication. In recent years, he has also studied unconditional lower bounds on the number of samples needed for learning under memory constraints.

The MPS team is pleased to provide travel and hotel accommodations to all annual meeting participants who can attend fully, including dinner, on Thursday, October 15. We kindly ask individuals who can only attend on Friday, which concludes at 2:00 PM, to participate remotely.

The Simons Foundation will never ask for credit card information or require payment for registration to our events.

Travel

Economy Class: For flights that are three hours or less to your destination, the maximum allowable class of service is Economy class.
Premium Economy Class: For flights where the total air travel time (excluding connection time) is more than three hours and less than seven hours per segment to your destination, the maximum allowable class of service is premium economy.
Business Class: When traveling internationally (or to Hawaii/Alaska) travelers are permitted to travel in Business Class on those segments that are seven hours or more. If the routing is over budget, a premium economy or mixed-class ticket will be booked.

Hotel

Up to 3 nights at the conference hotel, arriving on Wednesday, October 14 and departing on Saturday, October 17.

Air and Rail

The foundation will arrange and pay for round-trip travel from your home city to the conference city. All travel and hotel arrangements must be booked through the Simons Foundation’s preferred travel agency.

Travel Deviations

The following travel specifications are considered deviations and will only be accommodated if the cost is less than or equal to the amount the Simons Foundation would pay for a standard round-trip ticket from your home city to the conference city:

• Preferred airline
• Preferred travel class
• Specific flights/flight times
• Travel dates outside those associated with the conference
• Arriving or departing from an airport other than your home city or conference city airports, i.e. multi-segment or triangle trips.

All deviations must be reviewed and approved by the Simons Foundation and, if the cost is more than what would normally be paid, a reimbursement quote must be obtained through the foundation’s travel agency before proceeding to booking and paying for travel out of pocket. All reimbursements for travel booked directly will be paid after the conclusion of the meeting.

Changes After Ticketing

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 hotel accommodations are hosted by the foundation for a maximum of 3 nights at the conference hotel, arriving on Wednesday, October 14 and departing on Saturday, October 17.

Any additional nights are at the attendee’s own expense. To arrange accommodations, please register at the link included in your invitation.

Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel
112 W 25th St, New York, NY 10001
https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/nycmm-renaissance-new-york-chelsea-hotel/overview/

For driving directions to the Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel, please click here.

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 because of meetings not directly related to the Simons Foundation-hosted meeting (a satellite meeting or 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 the $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.

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.

Meeting & Policy Questions

Meghan Fazzi
Senior Manager, MPS
[email protected]

Travel & Hotel Support

FCM Travel Meetings & Events
[email protected]
Hours: M-F, 8:30 AM-5:00 PM ET
+1-888-789-6639