Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics

Applying Cutting-Edge Science to Everyday Life

What if you could predict crime and stop it before it happened?

It’s a prospect that understandably raises questions and concerns, but it’s the kind of state-of-the-art scientific work going on at UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM).

UCLA researchers have teamed up with the Los Angeles Police Department over the past few years to implement a practice known as predictive policing, which uses an algorithm to determine where crime is likely to happen in a specific area based on previous patterns.

“I’d had these ideas that human behavior is actually quite predictable and that you can study human behavior and understand where crime patterns come from in a very quantitative way,” says Jeffrey Brantingham, UCLA anthropology professor, who worked on the project.

IPAM is one of only eight National Science Foundation Mathematical Science Institutes in the country. It opened its doors in 2000 with its initial five-year grant, which was renewed in 2005 and again in 2010. IPAM fosters the interaction of mathematics with a broad range of science and technology, builds new interdisciplinary research communities, promotes mathematical innovation, and engages and transforms the world through mathematics. It fulfills its mission through workshops and programs that connect mathematics and other disciplines or multiple areas of mathematics.

Your gift will help the institute operate high-quality programs that attract both internationally renowned experts as well as promising young scholars. The need for cutting-edge, innovative mathematics is pressing in many fields, from seeking algorithms to locate disease genes to modeling the effect of economic changes on our climate. Fostering these techniques and training a new generation of mathematical scientists to develop and use them is central to IPAM’s mission.