Mason A. Porter is an American mathematician, physicist, and social scientist currently at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

. He is an Elected Fellow of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of ...

. He was elected to the 2018 class of

fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

s of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

Early life and education

Mason Porter was born in 1976 in

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

. He completed his studies at

Beverly Hills High School Beverly Hills High School (shortly as BHHS or Beverly) is a public high school in Beverly Hills, California. The other public high school in Beverly Hills is Moreno High School, a small alternative school located on Beverly Hills High School's c ...

in 1994 as the

salutatorian Salutatorian is an academic title given in Armenia, the Philippines, Canada, Afghanistan and the United States to the second-highest-ranked graduate of the entire graduating class of a specific discipline. Only the valedictorian is ranked higher. ...

of his class. Afterward, he attended

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

, where he was a member of Lloyd House. In 1998, he graduated in with a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

(

Honours degree Honours degree has various meanings in the context of different degrees and education systems. Most commonly it refers to a variant of the undergraduate bachelor's degree containing a larger volume of material or a higher standard of study, ...

) in Applied Mathematics. For his graduate studies, he went to the Center for Applied Mathematics at

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

, where he worked on quantum billiards. He was supervised by Richard Liboff and graduated in 2002 with a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

Career

Subsequently, Mason Porter had postdoctoral scholar positions at the

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Georgia Tech, GT, and simply Tech or the Institute) is a public university, public research university and Institute of technology (United States), institute of technology in Atlanta, ...

, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, and the

. From 2007 to 2016, he was a faculty member of the

Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford The Mathematical Institute is the mathematics department at the University of Oxford in England. It is one of the nine departments of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division. The institute includes both pure and app ...

and a Tutorial fellow at

Somerville College, Oxford Somerville College is a Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. It was founded in 1879 as Somerville Hall, one of its first two women's colleges. It began admitting men in 1994. The colle ...

. Currently, he is a professor of mathematics and sociology at the

. He has been working on a range of topics in applied and theoretical mathematics. These include community structure in

multidimensional network In network theory, multidimensional networks, a special type of ''multilayer network'', are networks with multiple kinds of relations. Increasingly sophisticated attempts to model real-world systems as multidimensional networks have yielded valua ...

dynamical system In mathematics, a dynamical system is a system in which a Function (mathematics), function describes the time dependence of a Point (geometry), point in an ambient space, such as in a parametric curve. Examples include the mathematical models ...

granular material A granular material is a conglomeration of discrete solid, macroscopic scale, macroscopic particles characterized by a loss of energy whenever the particles interact (the most common example would be friction when granulation, grains collide). T ...

topological data analysis In applied mathematics, topological data analysis (TDA) is an approach to the analysis of datasets using techniques from topology. Extraction of information from datasets that are high-dimensional, incomplete and noisy is generally challenging. TDA ...

, and

social network analysis Social network analysis (SNA) is the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks and graph theory. It characterizes networked structures in terms of ''nodes'' (individual actors, people, or things within the network) ...

. His collaborators include Danielle Bassett,

Andrea Bertozzi Andrea Louise Bertozzi (born 1965) is an American mathematician. Her research interests are in non-linear partial differential equations and applied mathematics. Education and career She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Princeton ...

, Charlotte Deane, and Heather Harrington.

Awards and honors

In 2014, he received an Erdős–Rényi Prize, recognizing his work on the mathematics of networks and his outreach efforts. In 2015, he was awarded a Whitehead Prize by the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's Learned society, learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh ...

in recognition of his interdisciplinary research, particularly the detection of communities in

networks Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

. He is a fellow of the

and an Elected Fellow of the

. In 2016, he was awarded a ''Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics'' by the

Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft The German Physical Society (German: , DPG) is the oldest organisation of physicists. As of 2022, the DPG's worldwide membership is cited as 52,220, making it one of the largest national physics societies in the world. The DPG's membership peaked ...

. In 2019 he was named a SIAM Fellow "for contributions to diverse problems and applications in networks, complex systems, and nonlinear systems".

Trivia

Mason Porter writes a blog called ''Quantum Chaotic Thoughts''. From 2016 onwards, he has been a Top Writer on

Quora Quora is an American social question-and-answer website and online knowledge market headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can post questions, answ ...

. He is a fan of the

Los Angeles Dodgers The Los Angeles Dodgers are an American professional baseball team based in Los Angeles. The Dodgers compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (baseball), National League (NL) National League West, West Div ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Porter, Mason Living people Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of the American Physical Society Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 21st-century American mathematicians 21st-century American physicists California Institute of Technology alumni Cornell University alumni 1976 births Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford American network scientists