Annual Undergraduate Awards
Every year the Mathematics Department nominates undergraduate students to receive awards recognizing outstanding achievement in mathematics and contributions to the mathematics community within Northwestern University.
The 2025-2026 Math UG Student Awards will be presented on Wednesday, May 20th at 5p in Annenberg G15 with guest speaker, Prof. Jordan Ellenberg (University of Wisconsin-Madison). The title of his talk is, "Big hypercubes, or: how to collaborate with a machine."
- Abstract: I’ll tell a story about a recent project I worked on with a bunch of combinatorists and a mathematician at Google DeepMind, in which we used a protocol called AlphaEvolve to help us work out an interesting example. I won’t give any proofs from the paper but everything in it is completely elementary and could have been observed 50 years ago, but happened not to be. I’ll explain how AlphaEvolve works, what the iteration between mathematicians and machine learning tools like in practice, and how this paper inspired the following variant of Sudoko