American Institute of Mathematics
The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) was founded in 1994 by John Fry, co-founder of Fry's Electronics, and located in the Fry's Electronics San Jose, California location. Privately funded by Fry at inception, in 2002, AIM became one of eight NSF-funded mathematical institutes.[1]
Brian Conrey became the institute's director in 1997.[1]
The Institute was founded with the primary goal of identifying and solving important mathematical problems. Originally, very small groups of top mathematicians would be assembled to solve a major problem, such as the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Now the Institute also runs an extensive program of week-long workshops on current topics in mathematical research. These workshops rely strongly on interactive problem sessions.
From 1998 to 2009 (with the exception of 1999), AIM annually awarded a prestigious five-year fellowship to an "outstanding new PhD pursuing research in an area of pure mathematics", and currently is not offering the fellowship.[2] AIM also sponsors local mathematics competitions and a yearly meeting for women mathematicians.
The Institute will eventually move to Morgan Hill, California, about 39 miles (63 km) to the southeast of San Jose, when its new facility there is completed. Plans for the new facility were started about 2000, but construction work was delayed by regulatory and engineering issues. In 2014 the AIM received permission to start construction of the facility, which will be built as a facsimile of The Alhambra, a 14th-century Moorish palace and fortress in Spain.[3]
Sponsored research
The American Institute of Mathematics has sponsored fundamental research for high-profile problems in several mathematical areas. Among them are:
Combinatorics
- The strong perfect graph theorem — proved in 2003 by Maria Chudnovsky, Neil Robertson, Paul Seymour, and Robin Thomas
- Hadwiger's conjecture — research by Neil Robertson and Paul Seymour.
Representation theory
- Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations, a massive project to compute the unitary representations of Lie groups. The computations have been done for the exceptional Lie group E 8.
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References
- The AIM home page
