Melody Chan facts for kids
Melody Tung Chan is an American mathematician and a talented violinist. She is currently a professor of mathematics at Brown University. She has won important awards like the Alice T. Schafer Prize and the AWM–Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory. Her work in math connects different areas, including how numbers and shapes relate, and the study of networks.
Early Life and Education
Melody Chan was inspired to play the violin when she was very young, after seeing the famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma on the TV show Sesame Street.
When she was a freshman at Scarsdale High School in Scarsdale, New York, she won first place in a competition for young artists. She was the youngest person ever to win this award from the Sarah Lawrence College chamber orchestra in 1997.
From 2000 to 2001, she studied violin at the famous Juilliard School with amazing teachers like Itzhak Perlman. In 2002, she even performed a Vivaldi violin piece with Perlman himself at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. This performance was shown on TV!
University Studies
After her violin studies, Melody Chan went to Yale University. There, she studied both computer science and mathematics. She continued to play violin in the Yale Symphony Orchestra.
While at Yale, she earned a special scholarship called the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. She also won the Hart Lyman Prize for being the best junior student at the university. She was even the vice president of the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, an honor society for top students. She graduated from Yale in 2005 with the highest honors, which is called summa cum laude.
Advanced Degrees
After Yale, Melody Chan studied at the University of Cambridge in England from 2005 to 2006. Then, she went to Princeton University, where she earned her master's degree in 2008.
She completed her highest degree, a doctorate (Ph.D.), in 2012 at the University of California, Berkeley. Her main research for this degree was about "tropical curves and metric graphs," which are special kinds of mathematical shapes and networks.
After getting her doctorate, she did more research at Harvard University from 2012 to 2015. In 2015, she joined Brown University as a professor.
Awards and Recognition
Melody Chan has received many important awards for her work in mathematics.
As an undergraduate student at Yale, she won the 2005 Alice T. Schafer Prize. This award was for her excellent research, which led to three published papers about special ways to color graphs (which are like networks of points and lines).
In 2018, she received a Sloan Research Fellowship. This fellowship is given to promising young scientists and scholars.
She was also the winner of the 2020 AWM–Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory. She won this award because of her breakthroughs in connecting different areas of math, especially between algebraic geometry (the study of shapes using algebra) and combinatorics (the study of counting and arrangements). The award recognized her "astounding results" and "foundational work" in these fields.
In 2022, she was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. This honor was given to her for her important contributions to math research, especially where algebraic geometry and combinatorics meet. She was also recognized for being a great mentor and for explaining complex math ideas clearly.
