National Science Foundation awards $15.5M to launch math institute at UChicago

Partnership of four Illinois universities will apply mathematical, statistical ideas to scientific progress and economic development. The new  Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation  at the University of Chicago comprises a collaborative group of mathematicians and statisticians from UChicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who seek to bring powerful mathematical ideas to bear on key contemporary scientific and technological challenges. IMSI is funded with a five-year, $15.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Researchers at IMSI will build a platform that accelerates the translation of applied mathematical and statistical techniques into solutions for urgent scientific and societal problems. Many of these problems arise naturally in a range of fields already being studied across the four partner institutions, including climate change, health care, quantum information theory, artificial intelligence, data science, economics and materials science. The current complex environment of science and engineering research involves a deep interaction of multiple disciplines to address scientific problems. These interactions, which are often at very large scales, need sophisticated mathematical and statistical approaches that underpin solutions to the scientific problems.