The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) was founded in 1994 by John Fry and is located in Palo Alto, California

Palo Alto, California

Palo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, United States. The city shares its borders with East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park. It is...

. Privately funded by Fry at inception, in 2002, AIM became one of eight NSF

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

-funded mathematical institutes.

Brian Conrey

Brian Conrey

John Brian Conrey is an American mathematician and the executive director of the American Institute of Mathematics. His research interests are in number theory, specifically analysis of L-functions and the Riemann zeta function. He received his B.S. from Santa Clara University in 1973 and received...

 has been director of the institute since 1997.

The Institute was founded with the primary goal of identifying and solving important mathematical problems. Originally, very small groups of top mathematicians would be assembled to solve a major problem, such as the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture

Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture

In mathematics, the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is an open problem in the field of number theory. Its status as one of the most challenging mathematical questions has become widely recognized; the conjecture was chosen as one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems listed by the Clay...

. Now the Institute also runs an extensive program of week-long workshops on current topics in mathematical research. These workshops rely strongly on interactive problem sessions.

AIM annually awards a prestigious five-year fellowship to an "outstanding new PhD pursuing research in an area of pure mathematics". The fellowship is currently worth US$4,000 per month for 60 months. AIM also sponsors local mathematics competitions and a yearly meeting for women mathematicians.

The Institute will eventually move to Morgan Hill, California

Morgan Hill, California

Morgan Hill is a city located in the southern part of Santa Clara County, California, United States. Founded on November 10, 1906, the city was named after Hiram Morgan Hill, a San Franciscan who built a country retreat home there in 1884...

, about 39 miles (63 km) to the southeast, when its new facility there is completed. Plans for the new facility were started about 2000, but construction work was delayed by regulatory and engineering issues into mid-2011. The facility will be built as a facsimile of The Alhambra

Alhambra

The Alhambra , the complete form of which was Calat Alhambra , is a palace and fortress complex located in the Granada, Andalusia, Spain...

, a 14th century Moorish palace and fortress in Spain.

Sponsored research

The American Institute of Mathematics has sponsored fundamental research for high-profile problems in several mathematical areas. Among them are:

Combinatorics

• The strong perfect graph theorem — proved in 2003 by Maria Chudnovsky
  Maria Chudnovsky
  Maria Chudnovsky is an Israeli mathematician. She is professor in the departments of mathematics and of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. She grew up in Russia and Israel, studying at the Technion, and received her Ph.D. in 2003 from Princeton University under...
  
  , Neil Robertson
  Neil Robertson (mathematician)
  G. Neil Robertson is a mathematician working mainly in topological graph theory, currently a distinguished professor at the Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. in 1969 at the University of Waterloo under his doctoral advisor William Tutte. According to the criteria of the Erdős Number...
  
  , Paul Seymour, and Robin Thomas
  Robin Thomas (mathematician)
  Robin Thomas is a mathematician working in graph theory at the Georgia Institute of Technology.Thomas received his doctorate in 1985 from Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia , under the supervision of Jaroslav Nešetřil...
  
  
• Hadwiger's conjecture
  Hadwiger conjecture (graph theory)
  In graph theory, the Hadwiger conjecture states that, if all proper colorings of an undirected graph G use k or more colors, then one can find k disjoint connected subgraphs of G such that each subgraph is connected by an edge to each other subgraph...
  
   — research by Neil Robertson
  Neil Robertson (mathematician)
  G. Neil Robertson is a mathematician working mainly in topological graph theory, currently a distinguished professor at the Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. in 1969 at the University of Waterloo under his doctoral advisor William Tutte. According to the criteria of the Erdős Number...
  
   and Paul Seymour.

Representation theory

• Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations, a massive project to compute the unitary representation
  Unitary representation
  In mathematics, a unitary representation of a group G is a linear representation π of G on a complex Hilbert space V such that π is a unitary operator for every g ∈ G...
  
  s of Lie group
  Lie group
  In mathematics, a Lie group is a group which is also a differentiable manifold, with the property that the group operations are compatible with the smooth structure...
  
  s. The computations have been done for the exceptional Lie group E 8.