The 2017 Line and Michel Loève International Prize in Probability is awarded to Hugo Duminil-Copin of IHES Paris and University of Geneva. The prize, which carries a monetary award of $30,000, will be presented at a ceremony in Berkeley to be held in November 2017.

Hugo Duminil-Copin received his Ph.D. in 2011 under Stanislav Smirnov at University of Geneva. He is best known for his early work on phase transitions in two-dimensional lattice models: the Ising and Potts models, and properties of percolation and self-avoiding walks. Within these intensively-studied fields, he and co-authors proved a wide range of longstanding hard conjectures for topics including the connective constant of the honeycomb lattice; critical points for random-cluster models; conformal invariance of the planar critical Ising and FK-Ising models; continuity of phase transitions and spontaneous magnetization in such models; and growth constants and critical fugacity of self-avoiding walks. Other major results involve sharp thresholds in more general settings, for bootstrap percolation as well as Bernoulli percolation and Ising models. Recently he and co-authors proved the longstanding Baxter’s conjecture about continuity/discontinuity of phase transition for the planar Potts model. He has written invaluable lecture notes illuminating the state of the art in many of these fields.

The Prize commemorates Michel Loève, who was Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1948 until his untimely death in 1979. The Prize was established by his widow, Line, shortly before her death in 1992. Awarded every two years, it is intended to recognize outstanding contributions by researchers in probability who are under 45 years old.