By Kevin Corlette, Douglas Simpson, and Panagiotis Souganidis
The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is a new National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded mathematical sciences research institute that is located at the University of Chicago and managed in partnership with Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is the newest member of the portfolio of institutes that are funded by NSF’s Division of Mathematical Sciences, joining the American Institute of Mathematics, School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics, Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute.
IMSI was founded on the belief that the mathematical sciences are a key enabler of progress in the wider enterprise of research, science, and technology, and the conviction that they must partake in this enterprise in order to thrive. While mathematical tools and insights have always been crucial to research in other disciplines, their usefulness has broadened and intensified in recent years. The National Academies’ report on The Mathematical Sciences in 2025 noted that the mathematical sciences are becoming “an increasingly integral and essential component of a growing array of areas of investigation.” It argued that “the mathematical sciences have an exciting opportunity to solidify their role as a linchpin of twenty-first century research and technology” by transforming into “a discipline with a much broader reach and greater potential impact.” IMSI aims to be a catalyst for this kind of transformation.
The mathematical sciences’ capacity to bring insight to urgent societal challenges is an important dimension of the field’s possible impact. Prominent examples include modeling the spread of COVID-19 and its interactions with social distancing policies, the economy, and various forms of infrastructure; modeling climate and the effects of climate change on the conditions that facilitate life on Earth; and investigating the power of ideas and techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning to transform human society, both for good and ill. The mathematical sciences can make a difference for these types of challenges, many of which demand all hands on deck. Responding to these issues is an essential component of realizing the mathematical sciences’ full potential and forms a core feature of IMSI’s mission. This active approach is also crucial to the health and diversity of the community; we are less likely to attract new talent to the field if we remain on the sidelines in the face of urgent situations.
This last point speaks to another thread in IMSI’s mission: the transformation of the mathematical sciences community. The 2025 report pointed out the benefits that the community could gain if more of its practitioners possessed the skills necessary for interdisciplinary communication and collaboration. Mathematicians with these qualities are critical to the discipline’s aforementioned transformation. They are also more likely to model a broad range of career paths in the mathematical sciences, and thus offer further opportunities for a diverse population to envision and define roles for themselves within the profession. IMSI intends to help researchers more fully develop communicative qualities through both research activities and workforce development programs, such as internships for graduate students.
Research at IMSI is organized around a set of scientific themes. These themes will evolve over time, but only on relatively long timescales — on the order of a decade or more. IMSI has identified six initial themes: climate science, data and information, health and medical care, materials science, quantum computing and information, and uncertainty quantification. This organizational scheme corresponds with IMSI’s intention that institute activity be driven primarily by applications, rather than specific techniques or areas within the mathematical sciences. We want to facilitate conversations that stem from problems that climate scientists, doctors, economists, and molecular engineers (among others) currently face, and explore ways in which the mathematical sciences might contribute.
We hope that this approach will also spark new conversations across disciplinary boundaries within the field. Organizing our efforts around applications that are relevant to multiple areas of mathematics can bring new perspectives to the connections between these areas. In particular, we expect IMSI to make the boundary between mathematics and statistics more porous by including both mathematicians and statisticians in as many scientific activities as possible.
All of these objectives will require effective communication between different research communities, which connects to another pillar of IMSI’s mission. Broadening the usefulness of research requires that we broaden access to the insights it produces. Researchers must be able to describe their work at various levels of accessibility and calibrate their communications to audiences with different technical backgrounds. One of IMSI’s ambitions is to develop training programs for institute visitors that prepare them to communicate with diverse audiences, including researchers in other disciplines, funding agencies, policymakers, and the public.
Scientific activity at IMSI will occur in a variety of forms:
- Long programs, typically three months in length, that bring a large interdisciplinary group of researchers together for a period of sustained focus on an area that is ripe for progress
- Workshops, either standalone or attached to a long program, that are typically up to a week in length
- Interdisciplinary research clusters, in which small interdisciplinary teams collaborate on promising projects
- Research collaboration workshops, during which teams of junior and senior researchers work on problems over several months and conclude their collaborations with a workshop.
All of these activities are expected to fall within the scope of IMSI’s scientific themes. Standalone workshops, which may explore a wider range of topics, are the sole exception.
IMSI is currently undergoing a ramp-up period, so research activity will primarily take the form of workshops. We expect to host several workshops in 2021 (either virtually or in-person) on the following topics: Mathematical and Computational Materials Science (February 15-19); Confronting Climate Change (March 1-5); The Multifaceted Complexity of Machine Learning (April 12-16); Topological Data Analysis (April 26-30); Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification Across Disciplines (May 10-14); Decision Making in Health and Medical Care: Modeling and Optimization (May 17-21); Quantum Information for Mathematics, Economics, and Statistics (May 24-28), and Eliciting Structure in Genomics Data: Bridging the Gap Between Theory, Algorithms, Implementations, and Applications (August 30-September 3). A workshop on Dealing with COVID-19 in Theory and Practice took place in late October.
We plan to follow what we expect will be a more typical schedule in 2021-2022, with a long program on Distributed Solutions to Complex Societal Problems in the fall and one on Decision Making and Uncertainty in the spring. Each program will have a linked introductory summer program in 2021.
We are hoping for significant engagement from the mathematics community. If you have ideas, we encourage you to reach out to us to discuss them.
Kevin Corlette is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago and director of the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI). Douglas Simpson is a professor in the Department of Statistics and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the associate director of IMSI. Panagiotis Souganidis is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and a member of the Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics at the University of Chicago. He is the scientific adviser at IMSI.