In the Media

Since meeting as undergraduates at MIT, graduate student Ashwin Sah '20 and Mehtaab Sawhney PhD '24 have “written a mind-boggling 57 math proofs together, many of them profound advances in various fields,” writes Leila Sloman for Quanta Magazine. Now, in what is being praised as a “huge achievement” and “phenomenally impressive” by fellow mathematicians, Sah and Sawhney have “obtained a long-sought improvement on an estimate of how big sets of integers can get before they must contain sequences of evenly spaced numbers." 

Prof. Jeff Gore speaks with Caity Weaver of The New York Times about retiring the U.S. penny and his belief that the penny should be retired. “People think that because it exists and is used, it means that it’s useful,” Gores notes. “We’re taking something that is actually a valuable commodity, something that has actual value, and then we’re converting it into something that people just throw away.” 

Writing for Forbes, Andrew Binns highlights research from Prof. Daron Acemoglu suggesting total productivity gains of AI could be as little as 0.53% over 10 years, much lower than common estimates. 

Rollerama, a pop-up roller skating rink at Kendall Common, has become a “corner of liveliness” this summer, providing the public with free fun and art in the form of a new mural by Massiel Grullon, reports Izzy Bryars for The Boston Globe. “We thought it could help people do something fun together, and start to give people a sense of what the Kendall Common build out will be like,” says Sarah Gallop, director of MIT’s Office of Government and Community Relations. 

Senior lecturer Paul McDonagh-Smith speaks with Forbes reporter Joe Mckendrick about the history behind the AI hype cycle. “While AI technologies and techniques are at the forefront of today’s technological innovation, it remains a field defined — as it has from the 1950s — by both significant achievements and considerable hype," says McDonagh-Smith. 

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Marketplace host Daniel Ackerman about the difficulties associated with Boston’s rental market, where due to the large number of college students many housing units start their lease cycles on September 1. “You can’t fit them all in the apartment at the same time,” explains Gruber. “You can’t all get moving trucks to move in that same day.” 

TechCrunch reporter Kyle Wiggers spotlights Codeium, a generative AI coding company founded by MIT alums Varun Mohan SM '17 and Douglas Chen '17. Codeium’s platform is run by generative AI models trained on public code, providing suggestions in the context of an app’s entire codebase. “Many of the AI-driven solutions provide generic code snippets that require significant manual work to integrate and secure within existing codebases,” Mohan  explains. “That’s where our AI coding assistance comes in.” 

Prof. Nathaniel Hendren speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Rachel Wolfe about the evolution of economic mobility in the United States. “It’s still a coin flip whether or not you’ll earn more than your parents, but mobility probably hit a record low in the early 2020s,” says Hendren. 

David Rush '07 pursues numerous challenges to promote STEM in education, but his role as the “globe’s most prolific Guinness World Record setter” stems from early sibling rivalry, reports Ramon Antonio Vargas for The Guardian. The thrill and accomplishment of beating his older brother at swimming led to attempting record breaking, which Rush uses as a metaphor for life’s trials. “If you set your mind to a goal, believe in yourself, pursue it with a passion, you can accomplish virtually anything,” he said.

Prof. Thomas Kochan speaks with Boston Globe reporter Dana Gerber to reflect on the impact of 2014 Market Basket protests. Kochan, who co-authored a case study about the protests, says “it’s still the most unprecedented worker action that we’ve seen in our century. We’ve never seen a non-union group take action in support of their CEO, and hold that solidarity — from the executives to the clerks to the truck drivers — for six weeks. And to get the support of the customers was a remarkable achievement.”

Graduate student Emelie Eldracher '22 will complete in the Paris Paralympics as a coxswain in the PR3 Mixed Coxed Four race, reports Henry Dinh-Price, Alexa Podalsky and Aiden Sprole for The Boston Globe. “While studying at MIT, Eldracher designed the first AI-powered heated jacket,” they write.

Anurag Bajpayee MS '08, PhD '12 and Prakash Govindan PhD '12 founded Gradiant, an MIT startup “trying to reduce both costs and energy while eliminating chemicals” in water, reports Diana Olick for CNBC. “We take highly contaminated wastewater which contains solvents, which contains dissolved salt, which contains organics, and we eliminate the entire liquid waste,” says Govindan.

MIT alumni Mike Ng and Nikhil Buduma founded Ambiance, which has developed an “AI-powered platform geared towards improving documentation processes in medicine,” reports Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle. “In a world filled with AI solutions in search of a problem, Ambience is focusing on a pain point that just about any doctor will attest to (after all, who likes filling out paperwork?),” writes Garfinkle. 

MIT ranks high on the Forbes’ America’s Top Colleges list of colleges providing the best ROI, reports Forbes’ Francesca Walton. Walton notes that MIT offers its students “stellar ROIs.” The magazine applied various economic metrics to Forbes’ top 500 colleges list, yielding “25 schools that offer a low-debt education and promise high earnings potential,” Walton explains. 

David Rush '07 shares his quest to break as many Guinness World Records as possible, conquering everything from setting a record time for juggling blindfolded to catching 59 marshmallows in his mouth in less than one minute and balancing 101 toilet paper rolls on his head, reports Cathy Free for The Washington Post. Rush now holds more than 181 world records. “I love the challenge and the training — it helps get me out of bed in the morning,” Rush says. “It’s a great feeling of accomplishment every time I can add another record to the list.”