Schramm Lecture in Probability and Stochastic Processes

The IMS and the Bernoulli Society have recently cooperated to create a new joint lecture in probability and stochastic processes, named in honor of Oded Schramm. The lecture will be given annually and will be featured at meetings (co)-sponsored by the IMS or the Bernoulli Society with a strong attendance by researchers in probability and stochastic processes. It is anticipated that the first Schramm lecture will be delivered at the Stochastic Processes and their Applications meeting to be held in Boulder, Colorado in 2013.

Oded Schramm (1961-2008) was an extraordinary mathematician whose life was cut short in a tragic hiking accident in September 2008. His work had a profound impact on probability --- he transformed our understanding of planar processes from statistical physics through his introduction of the Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE), tying probability theory to complex analysis in a completely novel way. He also made fundamental contributions to circle packings, random spanning trees, percolation, noise sensitivity of Boolean functions, random permutations and metric geometry.

Oded Schramm received many honors for his work, including the Erdos Prize in Mathematics in 1996, the Salem Prize in 2001, the Clay Research Award in 2002, the Poincare Prize in 2003, the Loeve Prize in 2003, the Polya Prize in 2006 and the Ostrowski Prize in 2007. He was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2008. Oded gave many key lectures, including plenary addresses in the 2004 European Congress of Mathematics and the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians, as well as an invited IMS-Bernoulli Society special lecture at the World Congress in Probability and Statistics held in Singapore in July 2008.

For further information on Oded Schramm, see http://research.microsoft.com/~schramm/memorial/

A fund has been established to support the travel expenses of the Schramm lecturer. Contributions to this fund in honor of Oded Schramm are welcome. To contribute, go to https://secure.imstat.org/secure/orders/schrammcontribution.asp