IAS Women+ and Mathematics – Ria

Conference name: IAS Women+ And Mathematics

Date: one week annually in late May

Location: The Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, NJ

Website: https://www.ias.edu/math/wam

Funding: Fully-funded! They generously fund your travel and you stay in small apartments with your fellow attendees and eat at their dining hall (which is delicious).

Topic: The topic is different every year. When I attended, it was The Mathematics of Machine Learning. Other years have included Representation Theory, Geometric Analysis and Geometry and Randomness in Group Theory.

Description: This is a weeklong program centered around two series of lectures relevant to the topic of study. The lecturers are both very well-established researchers in their fields. Every day, we attended both lectures, as well as some one-off Young Researcher Talks. These latter talks were primarily research talks by postdocs and assistant professors who participated in the rest of the program with us. Among these was Dr. Courtney Paquette, the McGill professor who told me about the event! Other activities included some teatimes with each other and researchers on the IAS campus, and a day at Princeton University, where we heard talks from  professors and toured the campus. One of my favourite parts was volunteering at a ‘Math Carnival’ at the Princeton Public Library, where we designed a bunch of math-related activities for kids from around town. Overall, this was a great experience and I would highly recommend that you consider attending as an upper-year undergraduate or grad student!! It was incredibly refreshing and inspiring to meet so many brilliant women and gender minorities making their marks in math. 

If you are interested in attending, the deadline to apply is in mid-February (it is past the deadline for the 2024 program, unfortunately). You need a letter of rec, which I would recommend you get from a professor who knows you well and understands to some extent what it means to be a woman+ in math!

Pictures

(more official pictures available here)