The French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) has awarded one of its 2018 Silver Medals to Grégory Miermont, professor at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. CNRS awards Silver Medals to early-career researchers distinguished by the originality, quality and importance of their work, who are recognized nationally and internationally.

Grégory Miermont has been a professor at ENS Lyon since 2012 and is a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He defended his thesis at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in 2003 under Jean Bertoin. His first steps as a researcher were the opportunity to solve and clarify many natural issues related to branching random structures (trees, fragmentation-coagulation processes). In recent years, his research has focused on the study of planar maps, a field in full development at the interface between combinatorics, theoretical physics and probabilities. It consists in understanding the large-scale properties of plane graphs. In 2011, Grégory solved the main open problem in the subject, namely the convergence of random quadrangulations towards a “continuous” random metric space (called the Brownian map), which was obtained independently by different methods by Jean-François Le Gall. In recent years, Grégory Miermont has achieved other important results in the field of random geometry. His work with Bettinelli on Brownian discs, his long article with Baur and Ray classifying all possible boundaries of quadrangulations with a boundary, or his fine work with Addario-Berry, Broutin and Goldschmidt on the scale limit of the minimal spanning tree on the complete graph can be cited in particular.

For more information on Grégory’s work and main publications, see the article at http://www.cnrs.fr/insmi/spip.php?article2865.