Professor Wendelin Werner to Deliver 2025 Terry Wall Lecture
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The Department of Mathematical Sciences is delighted to announce the 2025 Terry Wall Lecture in Pure Mathematics. Our guest speaker this year will be the renowned mathematician Professor Wendelin Werner, pioneer in the field of random processes and the study of phenomena at criticality, and winner of the Fields Medal.
The lecture will take place on Thursday 1st of May at 4pm in Lecture Theatre B, Central Teaching Hub. Coffee and tea will be available in the foyer outside the lecture theatre starting at 3:30pm. Refreshments will be served after the lecture.
No registration is necessary to attend the lecture in person. To attend remotely, please register here
Prof. Werner’s lecture is entitled "Connections via chains of random loops".
Abstract: I will describe a simple mathematical object related to basic physics. It is a cloud of independent random Brownian loops that can be thought of as appearing spontaneously in space or on a graph. For reasons that I will try to explain, the object of study are the connections that can be created by chains of intersecting loops. We will describe a new -- possibly surprising -- identity that allows to give an alternative exact description of the picture when one observes that two given points are connected, and we will discuss why this is of interest.
About the speaker
Wendelin Werner FRS is the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He received his PhD in 1993 from the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, under the supervision of Jean-François Le Gall.
The work of Prof. Werner has been fundamental to our understanding of random processes, connecting areas of mathematics such as statistical physics and complex analysis and shedding light on the fascinating interplay between randomness and continuity. He has made crucial contributions to our understanding of phenomena at criticality. These are points where a physical system has a phase transition, such as water freezing or boiling at 0 and 100 degrees Celsius respectively. Among his major accomplishments, is Prof. Werner's study of the Schramm-Lower evolution, which gives a unified description of a multitude of critical phenomena, as well as the Brownian loop-soup, which provides a new way of looking at objects in the plane.
Prof. Werner was awarded the Fields medal in 2006. He has received many other honours and accolades, including the Fermat Prize in 2001, the Pólya Prize in 2006, and the Heinz Gumin Prize in 2016. He was elected a Fellow to the Royal Society in 2020.
About the Terry Wall Lecture
The Terry Wall Lecture is an annual lecture on a topic in Pure Mathematics (broadly construed) by an internationally distinguished speaker. The lecture is named in honour of Professor Terry Wall FRS, Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Liverpool from 1965 until his retirement in 1999. During this time he served terms as Head of the Department of Pure Mathematics and as President of the London Mathematical Society. His research has been recognised by a number of prestigious awards and honours, including the Senior Whitehead Prize and the Pólya Prize of the LMS, the Sylvester Medal of the Royal Society, and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Professor Terry Wall FRS
For any queries please contact Alice Rizzardo