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

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

. 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 k ...

. He was elected to the 2018 class of

fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

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 ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

. He completed his studies at

Beverly Hills High School Beverly Hills High School (usually abbreviated as Beverly or as BHHS) is the only major public high school in Beverly Hills, California. The other public high school in Beverly Hills, Moreno High School, is a small alternative school located on B ...

in 1994 as the

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

of his class. Afterward, he attended

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

, where he was a member of

Lloyd House Lloyd House may refer to: People * Lloyd House (politician), Arizona state representative from 1967 to 1968 Buildings ;in the Netherlands *Lloyd Hotel, Dutch national monument in Amsterdam in the United Kingdom *Lloyd House, Birmingham in the Un ...

. In 1998, he graduated in with a

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

(

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, or ...

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

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

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

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

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 or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...

, the

Mathematical Sciences Research Institute The Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath), formerly the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), is an independent nonprofit mathematical research institution on the University of California campus in Berkeley, Califo ...

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 appli ...

and a Tutorial fellow at

Somerville College, Oxford Somerville College, a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England, was founded in 1879 as Somerville Hall, one of its first two women's colleges. Among its alumnae have been Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Dorothy Hodgkin, Ir ...

. Currently, he is Professor at the

. As of 2019, he has supervised eighteen doctoral students. 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 valuab ...

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. Examples include the mathematical models that describe the swinging of a ...

granular material A granular material is a conglomeration of discrete solid, macroscopic particles characterized by a loss of energy whenever the particles interact (the most common example would be friction when grains collide). The constituents that compose gra ...

topological data analysis In applied mathematics, topological based 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 challengin ...

, 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) a ...

. His collaborators include Alex Arenas, 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 Charlotte Mary Deane (born 1975) is an English Professor of Structural Bioinformatics and the former Head of the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford. Early life and education Charlotte Deane was born in May 1975. She comple ...

Heather Harrington Heather A. Harrington (born 1984) is an applied mathematician interested in dynamical systems, chemical reaction network theory, topological data analysis, and systems biology. She is professor of mathematics, and Royal Society University Researc ...

, and Peter Mucha.

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 The Whitehead Prize is awarded yearly by the London Mathematical Society to multiple mathematicians working in the United Kingdom who are at an early stage of their career. The prize is named in memory of homotopy theory pioneer J. H. C. Whiteh ...

by the

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

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. The DPG's worldwide membership is cited as 60,547, as of 2019, making it the largest physics society in the world. It holds an annual conference () and multiple ...

. In 2019 he was named a

SIAM Fellow The SIAM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognizes outstanding members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The goal of the program is to: *honor SIAM members who are recognized by their peers as distinguished ...

"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 a social question-and-answer website based in Mountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that ...

. 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 (NL) West division. Established in 1883 in the city of Brooklyn ...

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 Network scientists