Antonio (Tuca) Auffinger and Greg Lawler report:

Northwestern University hosted the 41st Stochastic Processes and their Applications conference July 8 –12, 2019, with 277 registered participants coming from 34 different countries. The most represented were the USA, Canada, Germany, Mexico, and the UK. The conference program consisted of 13 plenary talks, 48 invited talks, and 86 contributed talks. All talks and coffee breaks took place in the same building on campus with beautiful views of Lake Michigan.

Four food trucks were one of the highlights of a fantastic outdoor Monday reception during which Chris Burdzy announced that Allan Sly was the recipient of the 2019 Loève prize [see article here]. Allan was present to be congratulated as he was one of the 13 plenary speakers.

The Doob lecture was delivered by Jeremy Quastel while the Schramm lecture was given by Stanislav Smirnov. Massimilano Gubinelli, Jason Miller and Zhen-Qing Chen gave the Lévy, Doeblin, and Itô lectures respectively. The two IMS Medallion lecturers were Étienne Pardoux and Krzysztof Burdzy. The remaining plenary speakers were Béatrice de Tilière, James R. Lee, Dmitry Panchenko, Yinxia Ren, and Caroline Uhler.

Long lunch breaks provided opportunities for graduate students, junior and senior researchers to interact. There was also time for social events. On Wednesday afternoon, participants had the chance to explore both Evanston and Chicago. On Thursday evening, there was an unforgettable dinner at Tapas Barcelona with live music performances and sing-along led by Greg Lawler and Tom Alberts.

The weather was perfect the whole week but foremost it was five days of amazing and inspiring talks. You can see for yourself: for the first time in the history of SPAs the plenary talks were recorded and are available to the watch on the conference webpage (they’re also on YouTube) at https://sites.math.northwestern.edu/SPA2019/SPA2019.html