Fields Medal – Stanislav Smirnov
Stanislav Smirnov is being awarded the 2010 Fields medal for the proof of conformal invariance of percolation and the planar Ising model in statistical physics.
Fields Medal - Stanislav Smirnov, Université de Genève
It was predicted in the 1990’s, and used in many studies, that the scaling limit of various two dimensional models in statistical physics has an unexpected symmetry, namely it is conformally invariant. Smirnov was the first to prove this rigorously for two important cases, percolation on the triangular lattice and the planar Ising model. The proof is elegant and it is based on extremely insightful combinatorial arguments. Smirnov’s work gave the solid foundation for important methods in statistical physics like Cardy’s Formula, and provided an all-important missing step in the theory of Schramm-Loewner Evolution in the scaling limit of various processes.
Brief Biodata
Stanislav Smirnov was born in 1970 in St. Petersburg, Russia. He attended the 239th mathematical school and St. Petersburg State University where he studied mathematical analysis with Viktor Havin. After graduating in 1992 he moved to the California Institute of Technology where he received his Ph. D. in 1996 under the direction of Nikolai Makarov. Smirnov spent an important part of his career in Stockholm, Sweden, where he came in 1998 after holding a Gibbs instructorship at Yale as well as short time positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics (MPIM), Bonn. He became professor at the Royal Institute of Technology and researcher at the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in 2001. Since 2003 he is a professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
Smirnov works in analysis, dynamical systems, probability and mathematical physics. His distinctions include the St. Petersburg Mathematical Society Prize (1997), the Clay Research Award (2001), the Salem Prize (2001), the Gran Gustafsson Research Prize (2001), the Rollo Davidson Prize (2002), the European Mathematical Society Prize (2004). His research is supported by the European Research Council and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Contact
Email: stanislav.smirnov at unige.ch
Phone: (+41)-22-3791149
Mailing address: Section de Mathématiques, Université de Genève, 24, rue du Liévre, c.p. 64, 1211 Genève 4, SWITZERLAND
