Professor Larry Washington, associate chair for undergraduate education in UMD's math department, works with students attending the first year of the Brin Maryland Mathematics Camp in 2024. The camp for exceptional high school math students was funded by a $27.2 million gift from Michael and Eugenia Brin. (Credit: Mark Sherwood)

The year after a new mathematics research center sprang up on the University of Maryland campus, the math department chair flew to California to talk to the couple who’d made it possible, Professor Emeritus Michael Brin and his wife, Eugenia.

Chair Doron Levy laid out all that he and colleagues raced to accomplish since the $4.75 million gift was announced in 2021—hosting international conferences, supporting research, renovating office space, hiring staff and conducting layers of strategic planning. Pleased by their progress, Michael Brin looked up and joked, “I don’t remember giving you so much money.”

It was the best endorsement the math chair could have hoped for regarding the Brin Mathematics Research Center. Before long, the Brins would give much more, donating an additional $27.2 million to endow the center, which has blossomed into a leading global crossroads for math research; UMD has climbed the U.S. News & World Report rankings to become the nation’s No. 6 graduate-level math program among public universities. 

Of that total amount, $2 million created two endowed professorships in the department, while $200,000 funded the piloting of a summer math camp for exceptionally talented youths.

That March 2024 gift is included in Forward: The University of Maryland Campaign for the Fearless, a campuswide effort to raise $2.5 billion that officially kicked off this week. The Brins and the Sergey Brin Family Foundation, established by the couple’s older son, Sergey, a Google co-founder and 1993 UMD graduate, have given approximately $57 million to UMD.

“This latest gift from the remarkable Brin family has been truly transformative and a testament to the power of philanthropy in shaping academic excellence,” said Amitabh Varshney, dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences and professor of computer science. “Thanks to their generosity, we have welcomed hundreds of scholars and students into our vibrant mathematics community through Brin Mathematics Research Center workshops and the Brin Maryland Mathematics Camp.”

Beyond the physical space in the Computer Science Instructional Center, one of the most visible results of the Brins’ philanthropy is the steady drumbeat of workshops, summer schools and distinguished lectures. The events are central to the Brin Center’s operations because academic mathematics, despite what the uninitiated might envision, is an intensely social discipline.

On a recent weekday, Levy showed a visitor around the center as dozens of mathematics researchers from around the world listened to a talk in a central auditorium as part of the weeklong “North American Descriptive Set Theory Meeting.” Later, he said, they might brainstorm together or grab coffee and break into smaller groups. Others could head to the offices the center provides to visiting scholars for solo calculations before reconvening.

“The main goal is to have more spectacular mathematicians from all over the world come to Maryland to give us the chance to work with them on research,” Levy said. “But also, people come here and find out what Maryland is all about and it raises our profile. Another effect is that our students, postdocs and faculty get frequent opportunities to interact with people of this caliber who probably wouldn’t be here without the center.”

Such conferences at the Brin Center put Maryland on the global map, said Ravi Vakil, president of the American Mathematical Society and professor of mathematics at Stanford University.

“You have a constant flow of the smartest mathematicians in the world going through College Park all the time,” he said.

Maryland’s math department already had an unusually broad base; it has long been respected in pure and applied mathematics research. The Brin family’s philanthropy activated that potential to create a math institute that’s both unusually comprehensive and, in the U.S. at least, uniquely free from constraints tied to government funding requirements.

“There was no ramp-up where you had five people slowly trying to build an institute from the ground up,” Vakil said. “It immediately became a place where there are a lot of possibilities, and anything happening is going to be a big deal.”

The 2024 gift also supported the establishment of two new Brin Professorships in Mathematics that brought internationally recognized researchers to UMD: Uri Bader, a leader in the area of mathematics that comes from the Furstenberg/Margulis school of ergodic theory and discrete subgroups of Lie groups; and Ron Peled, an expert in statistical physics and probability theory.

The Brins’ $2 million contribution to create the endowed positions was matched by the state Department of Commerce through the Maryland E-Nnovation Initiative, a program created to spur basic and applied research in scientific and technical fields at colleges and universities. 

In addition, the Brin Maryland Mathematics Camp, first offered in summer 2024, gives students who’ve exhausted their high schools’ offerings a new challenge—and serves as a new recruitment tool. At least one student who participated in the camp is now enrolled at UMD as a math major, said Professor Larry Washington, associate chair for undergraduate studies.“We take some of the best math students from around the state—maybe the only ones in their schools ready for upper-level college math—and give them an experience they wouldn’t have in high school,” he said.

The Brins began making gifts to UMD in 2005, starting with an endowed chair in the Department of Mathematics, where Michael worked for 31 years. 

“I am pleased to support the University of Maryland and to see the Brin Mathematics Center elevate the Department of Mathematics,” said Michael.

The Brins later endowed seven additional chairs and professorships in CMNS, including the Eugenia Brin Professorship that supports data assimilation research aimed at improving weather prediction and climate studies. Eugenia, a former NASA scientist, died in 2024.

They also established the Michael Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems, the Brin Postdoctoral Fellowship program and the Michael Brin Graduate Student Endowed Fellowship program, all in mathematics. The couple’s younger son, Sam, a 2009 UMD graduate, led the Brin Family Foundation’s donation to establish the Brin Family Aerial Robotics Lab located in the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering; it provides a flight testing area for drones.

In the College of Arts and Humanities, the couple established the Maya Brin Endowed Professorship in Dance and the Maya Brin Distinguished Lecturer in Russian in honor of Michael Brin’s mother, and created the Maya Brin Residency Program in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures to bring leading cultural figures to campus for short-term stays.

In 2021, they gave $9 million to the university’s School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies to create the Maya Brin Institute for New Performance, in honor of her love of the performing arts. It has added courses, expanded research and funded new teaching positions, undergraduate scholarships, classroom and studio renovations, and instructional technology.

Written by Chris Carroll. College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences staff contributed to this article.

After a rewarding summer internship in 2025, mathematics major Arianna Maxwell will return to Roblox as a full-time employee in June.

By Jason P. Dinh

Arianna Maxwell was ecstatic when a recruiter from the online gaming and technology company Roblox called her late one evening last winter, offering her a summer internship in software development. 

“I was so elated,” she said. “After talking to the recruiter, I called my dad and was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe I got it.’”

Maxwell, a senior majoring in mathematics at the University of Maryland, always loved video games. She was raised in Santa Cruz, California, and relishes childhood memories of playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo Wii with her dad. She also played Roblox growing up.

“During my internship, I reminisced when I looked at current popular experiences because sometimes they were the same ones from when I was young,” she said. 

Maxwell always wanted to work in the gaming industry. Games were her gateway to computer programming—she created Minecraft mods starting in middle school. But she didn’t major in computer science. Instead, she pursued her other passion: mathematics. 

Maxwell first fell in love with math during high school. She was drawn to the definitive nature of proofs—how they could be arbiters of right and wrong. But she said it was the “cool and creative” nature of math that captivated her. After she realized that the field had broad applications and offered more than just memorizing formulas and rote work, “it was pretty hard to drop the interest,” she explained. 

She explored math inside and outside the classroom at UMD. For example, through an undergraduate fellowship with UMD’s MathQuantum Research Training Group, she researched algorithms for partial differential equations on quantum computers. In her free time, she read computer science textbooks to teach herself how to code. 

“It sounds embarrassing to say that I read textbooks for fun,” she said, laughing. But her hard work in self-teaching paid off once she started her internship at Roblox. 

Over the summer, she worked on a feature called instance streaming, which loads objects into and out of the video game. Now, Maxwell will return to Roblox as a full-time software development engineer after she graduates in the spring. She’s looking forward to working on a broader range of engineering problems—and applying her math skills to her new work.  

One obvious application is image rendering work, she said, which she has pursued through independent projects in her free time. 

“So much of computer graphics is trying to use computer science and algorithms to render images and do a good job approximating life. A lot of that is just math, and then optimization to make it practical,” she explained. “There’s a lot of discrete math involved in computer science. The higher you go, I’ve noticed that the two fields blend more and more.”

Beyond subject matter expertise, her math studies fortified her discipline and strengthened her resolve by requiring her to focus on solving a single problem for four to five hours at a time. Plus, she developed a strong quantitative intuition and abstract reasoning skills. 

“Math training really helps in being able to hold and manipulate many moving pieces in your mind,” she said. “The practice develops the abstract reasoning required to think through any complex system.” 

Those skills are useful in any field of employment, she said—and, looking ahead toward a long career, she believes they’ll take her a long way.

While many 17-year-olds last spring were preoccupied with planning for prom, studying for AP exams or booking houses for beach week, Hannah Cairo was shocking the not very teen-coded world of theoretical math. 

In February, she disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a math assumption that had stumped experts around the world for 40 years (and is impossible to summarize in lay terms). And she did it as a side project to her classes. 

“Once I start working on a problem, it’s kind of addictive,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about it. For every question I answer, I just have more questions.”

Now the remarkable teen will pursue those answers as she starts her doctoral studies at the University of Maryland this fall. 

“She stands out head and shoulders above her peers,” said math Professor Wojciech Czaja, comparing her to prodigies like alums Charles Fefferman ’66, who won the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, and George Dantzig ’36, who famously solved two open problems in statistical theory after mistaking them for homework. Cairo didn’t just tackle “a niche question that a small group of people were interested in. This is a well-known problem, spanning various areas of math.” 

Growing up in the Bahamas, Cairo was homeschooled. Her affinity for math became apparent early as she raced through the Khan Academy’s online curriculum, learning calculus by 11. She pored over math textbooks on topics like analytic number theory under the guidance of tutors, finding beauty in the numbers and ideas. It was sometimes a lonely experience, but she found like-minded people when she joined her first math circle, extracurricular gatherings of mathematicians and students. 

“They bring math puzzles and everybody collaborates, and it’s a really nice way to make friends,” she said. 

That led her to apply at age 14 to the Berkeley Math Circle online summer program, where she found both challenge and camaraderie. A few years later, her family moved to California, and she joined Berkeley’s concurrent enrollment program to take graduate-level math courses. 

One of those was on Fourier restriction theory, a branch of harmonic analysis, an area that has wide-ranging applications from telecommunications to music analysis and even image processing. 

A few months in, Professor Ruixiang Zhang assigned a simplified version of the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture in homework. Cairo quickly completed the assignment—but couldn’t stop thinking about the problem. She spent months on proofs, consulting Zhang along the way, before coming up with her construction to disprove the conjecture. 

She posted it to arXiv.org in February, and within a few months, she gave a talk at a prestigious math conference in Spain. Since then, she has gotten media coverage in Scientific American, Quanta Magazine and international new outlets. 

It could be overwhelming, but Cairo, despite being soft-spoken, is eager to share her work. 

In person, “it’s funny when people try to guess my age,” said Cairo, now 18. With her quiet poise, she’s often mistaken for a postdoc or a grad student when she’s among fellow mathematicians—but when she volunteered at a summer program, was mistaken for a camper. “I don’t hide my age, but I don’t want to brag about it.” 

Maryland was eager to recruit Cairo, led by math graduate program director Leonid Koralov. Now, he and Czaja are eager to help her maximize her potential at UMD. She’ll continue to research Fourier restriction theory, but they also hope she can examine “other questions of importance to modern science,” said Czaja. 

Cairo also hopes to explore additional opportunities on and off campus. As a trans woman, she hopes to increase visibility for LGBTQ+ students, and she’s also joined an animal rights student group. Once she’s passed her qualifying exams and settled in, she hopes to start a math circle for K-12 students in the local community, using games like Nim and Set to pique their interest. 

“Mathematics to me is like an art, but in school they don't really teach it that way,” she said. “If you’re just memorizing steps, you’re not learning how to build things with ideas, paint pictures with ideas. I want to try to help people do that.”

Written by Karen Shih