Mason Porter

Mason Porter
Born (1976-02-10) 10 February 1976 (age 48)
Los Angeles, California
NationalityAmerican
Alma materCornell University, California Institute of Technology
Known forWork on Network science
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics, Physics, Sociology
InstitutionsUniversity of California at Los Angeles, Somerville College, Oxford, Georgia Institute of Technology
ThesisQuantum chaos in vibrating billiard systems (2002)
Doctoral advisorRichard Liboff[1]

Mason A. Porter is an American mathematician, physicist, and social scientist currently at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He is an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.[2][3] He was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society.[4]

Early life and education

Mason Porter was born in 1976 in Los Angeles. He completed his studies at Beverly Hills High School in 1994 as the salutatorian of his class. Afterward, he attended California Institute of Technology, where he was a member of Lloyd House. In 1998, he graduated in with a Bachelor of Science (Honours degree) in Applied Mathematics. For his graduate studies, he went to the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, where he worked on quantum billiards. He was supervised by Richard Liboff and graduated in 2002 with a PhD.[3]

Career

Subsequently, Mason Porter had postdoctoral scholar positions at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology. From 2007 to 2016, he was a faculty member of the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and a Tutorial fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. Currently, he is a professor of mathematics and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.[5]

He has been working on a range of topics in applied and theoretical mathematics. These include community structure in multidimensional networks, dynamical systems, granular material, topological data analysis, and social network analysis. His collaborators include Danielle Bassett, Andrea Bertozzi, Charlotte Deane, and Heather Harrington.[citation needed]

Awards and honors

In 2014, he received an Erdős–Rényi Prize, recognizing his work on the mathematics of networks and his outreach efforts.[6] In 2015, he was awarded a Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society in recognition of his interdisciplinary research, particularly the detection of communities in networks. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.[7][2] In 2016, he was awarded a Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.[8] In 2019 he was named a SIAM Fellow "for contributions to diverse problems and applications in networks, complex systems, and nonlinear systems".[9]

Trivia

Mason Porter writes a blog called Quantum Chaotic Thoughts.[10] From 2016 onwards, he has been a Top Writer on Quora. He is a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers.[3]

References

  1. ^ Porter, Mason. "personal CV" (PDF). Retrieved 2017-06-18.
  2. ^ a b "Mason A. Porter". aps.org. Retrieved April 24, 2017.
  3. ^ a b c "Mason A. Porter". ucla.edu. Retrieved 2019-08-03.
  4. ^ 2018 Class of the Fellows of the AMS, American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2017-11-03
  5. ^ Mason Porter - Mathematics Genealogy Project, North Dakota State University, retrieved 2019-08-03
  6. ^ ER Prize, NetSci Society, retrieved 2019-08-03
  7. ^ 2018 Class of the Fellows of the AMS, American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2017-11-03
  8. ^ "Call for Proposals". dpg.-physik.de. Retrieved August 3, 2019.
  9. ^ "SIAM Fellows Class of 2019". Retrieved 2019-09-01.
  10. ^ Quantum Chaotic Thoughts, Mason Porter, retrieved 2019-08-03