Nike Sun is a probability theorist who works as a Professor of Mathematics at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

as of July 2024, on leave from the department of statistics at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. She won the

Rollo Davidson Prize The Rollo Davidson Prize is a prize awarded annually to early-career probabilists by the Rollo Davidson trustees. It is named after English mathematician Rollo Davidson (1944–1970). Rollo Davidson Trust In 1970, Rollo Davidson, a Fellow-e ...

in 2017. Her research concerns

phase transition In physics, chemistry, and other related fields like biology, a phase transition (or phase change) is the physical process of transition between one state of a medium and another. Commonly the term is used to refer to changes among the basic Sta ...

s and the

counting complexity In computational complexity theory and computability theory, a counting problem is a type of computational problem. If ''R'' is a search problem then :c_R(x)=\vert\\vert \, is the corresponding counting function and :\#R=\ denotes the corresp ...

of problems ranging from the

Ising model The Ising model (or Lenz–Ising model), named after the physicists Ernst Ising and Wilhelm Lenz, is a mathematical models in physics, mathematical model of ferromagnetism in statistical mechanics. The model consists of discrete variables that r ...

in physics to the behavior of random instances of the

Boolean satisfiability problem In logic and computer science, the Boolean satisfiability problem (sometimes called propositional satisfiability problem and abbreviated SATISFIABILITY, SAT or B-SAT) asks whether there exists an Interpretation (logic), interpretation that Satisf ...

in computer science.

Education and career

Sun graduated from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

in 2009 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in statistics, and spent a year studying for the

Mathematical Tripos The Mathematical Tripos is the mathematics course that is taught in the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Origin In its classical nineteenth-century form, the tripos was a di ...

at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

before completing her doctorate at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

in 2014. Her dissertation, ''Gibbs measures and phase transitions on locally tree-like graphs'', was supervised by Amir Dembo. After postdoctoral research at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

in New England, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mathematics Department, and as a Simons Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor in 2016. She moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an associate professor in 2018.

Recognition

Sun was awarded the

, given annually to an early-career probability theorist, in 2017. The award citation credited her research (with Jian Ding and

Allan Sly Allan Sly FRBS (born 1951) is an English sculptor and senior lecturer at Wimbledon College of Art, a constituent college of University of the Arts London. Sly was elected a Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors in 1992. Early lif ...

) proving the existence of a threshold density such that random -satisfiability instances whose ratio of clauses to variables is below the threshold are almost always satisfiable, and instances whose ratio is above the threshold are almost always unsatisfiable. She was awarded the 2020 Wolfgang Doeblin prize by the

Bernoulli Society The Bernoulli Society is a professional association that aims to further the progress of probability and mathematical statistics, founded as part of the International Statistical Institute in 1975. It is named after the Bernoulli family The Berno ...

, given biannually to a single individual for outstanding research in the field of probability, and who is at the beginning of their mathematical career. She was an invited plenary speaker at the 40th Stochastic Processes and their Applications conference.

References

External links

Home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sun, Nike Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century American mathematicians American statisticians Women statisticians Probability theorists University of California, Berkeley faculty Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Stanford University alumni Harvard University alumni 21st-century American women mathematicians