Nike Sun facts for kids

Nike Sun is a brilliant mathematician who studies chance and randomness. As of July 2024, she is a Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before this, she worked at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2017, she won the Rollo Davidson Prize for her amazing work.

Her research explores how things change suddenly, like water turning into ice. This is called a phase transition. She also studies how hard it is to count certain things in math problems. Her work helps understand complex systems, from physics models like the Ising model to computer science puzzles like the Boolean satisfiability problem.

Her Journey in Math

Nike Sun started her higher education at Harvard University. In 2009, she earned two degrees: a bachelor's in math and a master's in statistics. After Harvard, she spent a year studying advanced math at the University of Cambridge in England.

She then went to Stanford University for her doctorate degree. She finished her big research project, called a dissertation, in 2014. Her project was about "Gibbs measures and phase transitions on locally tree-like graphs." Her professor, Amir Dembo, guided her work.

After getting her doctorate, she did more advanced research. She worked at Microsoft Research in New England and at MIT's Math Department. She was also a special researcher, a Simons Fellow, at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2016, she became a professor at Berkeley. Then, in 2018, she moved to MIT as an associate professor.

Awards and Special Recognition

Nike Sun has received several important awards for her contributions to mathematics.

The Rollo Davidson Prize

In 2017, Nike Sun was given the Rollo Davidson Prize. This award is given each year to a young mathematician who studies probability. The award recognized her research with Jian Ding and Allan Sly. They proved something very interesting about a type of computer science puzzle called k-satisfiability.

They found a special "tipping point" for these puzzles. If the number of rules in the puzzle compared to its parts is below this point, the puzzle almost always has a solution. But if the number of rules is above this point, the puzzle almost always has no solution. This discovery is very important in computer science.

The Wolfgang Doeblin Prize

Nike Sun also won the 2020 Wolfgang Doeblin Prize. The Bernoulli Society gives this award every two years. It celebrates outstanding research in probability by someone who is at the beginning of their math career.

Invited Speaker

She was also asked to be a main speaker at a big math event. This was the 40th Stochastic Processes and their Applications conference. Being an "invited plenary speaker" means she was chosen to give a major talk to everyone at the conference.