Professor John Wilmes (MATH) figured his odds at winning the Wellington Prize, a prize for assistant professors on campus, were slim to none and decided to not attend the faculty meeting when the drawing was held, he told The Brandeis Hoot in an interview. According to the fall 2018 faculty statistics, The Hoot calculated that Wilmes—along with all the other contestants—had only a 1.1 percent chance of winning the prize.
After being announced the winner of the prize, Wilmes did not know what to do with the prize money, deciding between many different options. “You can use the prize money for anything,” Wilmes explained. “I’ve been telling myself for years that I should go get a new bike.” Wilmes told The Hoot that he bikes to work everyday, regardless of the weather.
“But I knew it was more in the spirit of the prize to go do something memorable,” he said.
Every assistant professor that has won the Wellington Prize was not at the meeting where his/her name was drawn, according to a BrandeisNOW article. “I found out after the fact about the long tradition of faculty not going to the meeting and winning,” Wilmes told BrandeisNOW.
When considering what to do, Wilmes’ wife, Madlen, suggested they go visit sloths. Wilmes was instantly hooked. The two traveled to Peru in summer 2019 in efforts to go see sloths. Wilmes was originally considering going to Costa Rica but decided to go to Peru because of the weather. He explained that during the timing of their trip, Costa Rica was in its rainy season, and they did not want to get caught in the rain.
While in Peru, Wilmes and his wife traveled to the Amazon jungle and went canoeing and camping in the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, according to a BrandeisNOW article.
Wilmes explained that it is actually very difficult to see sloths out in the wild, “You’re better off going to a zoo or sanctuary to see them,” he said.
Despite difficulties finding sloths, while canoeing and exploring the Amazon jungle, Wilmes was fascinated by the spider monkeys he saw.
“These troupes of spider monkeys were swinging through the canopy, hundreds at a time,” Wilmes recounted. “They all follow the same one or two routes through the canopy, and this involves launching between branches of trees. So it looks like there’s someone up in the canopy of the tree chucking monkeys out of one tree into another one.”
He also spoke about seeing two different species of river dolphins, one of which was pink, coming out of the water every 15 minutes.
While on campus, Wilmes is a professor in the applied math program whose research interests are in the theory of computing and combinatorics. “A major focus is at the intersection of the algorithmic Graph Isomorphism problem and algebraic combinatorics,” according to the Brandeis website. His interest is looking into the connection between the structure and symmetry of graphs.
Wilmes’ interests also include computational learning theory, “particularly in provable guarantees for neural network algorithms,” according to the Brandeis website.
The Wellington Prize is an annual award, created in 1983 by an anonymous donor to give a Brandeis assistant professor $3,000 “to spend on anything but academic research,” according to a BrandeisNOW article.
Wilmes presented his escapades at a faculty meeting on Sept. 13. The next winner of the Wellington Prize will be presented in May 2020.
