COSAM News Articles 2023 August Auburn mathematician works with international team of physicists and mathematicians to win best software award at ISSAC 2023

Auburn mathematician works with international team of physicists and mathematicians to win best software award at ISSAC 2023

Published: 08/29/2023

The International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC) takes place every two years; the 2023 edition took place last month in Tromso, Norway. ISSAC is the premier showcase for progress in computational algebra, with Maplesoft and the German Fachgruppe Computeralgebra jointly awarding a prize for the best new software.

This year the prize went to a team of physicists and mathematicians for their work on the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM). The team consisted of physicists Yang-Hui He (London/Oxford), Vishnu Jejjala (Witwatersrand), Brent Nelson (Northeastern) and mathematicians Mike Stillman (Cornell) and Hal Schenck (Auburn).

The standard model of particle physics has been spectacularly successful at explaining most of the interactions between the strong force, the weak force, and electromagnetism. But there are issues in incorporating gravity into the model, and MSSM is one approach to bridging this gap.

Some aspects of MSSM have remained out of reach due to the large number of variables and complexity of the equations involved. The software produced by the team takes advantage of previously unexploited mathematical structure to resolve questions about MSSM that have been open for over 25 years.

“It has been great to have a chance to work with a collaborative team; by combining the different skill sets of physicists and mathematicians we made progress that would not have been possible without an interdisciplinary approach. And, special thanks to the Leverhulme foundation, which funded my semester in Oxford, where our work took place.”