- November 06, 2025
- By Chris Carroll
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.
Shweta Bansal, a biologist and expert in global infectious diseases at Georgetown University, conducts a workshop at the Brin Mathematics Research Center, which hosts many conferences and workshops on pure and applied mathematics yearly, with attendees from around the world.
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.
From left, Michael, Sam, Sergey and the late Eugenia Brin. (Photo courtesy of the Brin family)
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.
College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences staff contributed to this article.