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 (see http://math.colorado.edu/spa2013/).

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 Erdős Prize in Mathematics (1996), the Salem Prize (2001), the Clay Research Award (2002), the Poincaré Prize (2003), the Loève Prize (2003), the Pólya Prize (2006) and the Ostrowski Prize (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 in Singapore in July 2008. For further information on Oded 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