Shaoyun Bai

Bio

Shaoyun Bai joined the Department of Mathematics at MIT in July 2024. He completed undergraduate study at Tsinghua University in 2017 and earned his PhD in Mathematics from Princeton University under the supervision of John Pardon in 2022. After holding short-term visiting positions at MSRI (now known as SLMath) as a McDuff Postdoctoral Fellow and the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, he was a Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University during the academic year 2023-2024 before joining MIT.

Bai is interested in symplectic topology and its interaction with other fields, including algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, geometric topology, and dynamics. He has been developing new toolkits for counting problems from moduli spaces, which have been applied to classical questions, including the Arnold conjecture, periodic points of Hamiltonian maps, higher-rank Casson invariants, enumeration of embedded curves, and topology of symplectic fibrations.