Hugo Duminil-Copin is now a permanent professor at IHES

Born in 1985, Hogo Duminil-Copin is a probabilist. He studied at Univesité Paris XI and he obtained a teaching diploma in mathematics, agrégation, from École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He then moved to the University of Geneva where, after getting a PhD under the supervision of Stanislas Smirnov in 2012, he became assistant professor (2013-2014), and then professor in 2014. He has already been awarded several distinctions, among which the « Early Career Award of the International Association of Mathematical Physics » in 2015. Very recently he has been among the ten laureates of the European Mathematical Society Prize of 2016, which was awarded during the 7th European Congress of Mathematics.

Even though his main focus is on probability, his work has an impact on mathematical physics, complex and combinatorial analysis. He has published more than 30 papers in some of the highest impact journals of his field.

The works of Hugo Duminil-Copin have contributed significantly to percolation theory, a field in probability that describes the behaviour of connected clusters on a random graph. Particularly, his interest is directed to random walks, so called because at each step the direction of motion is chosen randomly. In collaboration with his PhD supervisor, Stanislas Smirnov, he has worked on self-avoiding walks (SAWs), where the walker never goes back to a position that he has already visited. The number of possible SAWs depends on the lattice on which the walker moves. For walks characterised by a very large number of steps, such number can be expressed in terms of a constant called  « connectivity constant ». Hugo Duminil-Copin calculated the connectivity constant for the honeycomb lattice. SAWs are at the heart of important physical questions. In statistical mechanics they are used as models for polymer chains.

As part of the series of lectures organised by IHES during March 2017, the so-called “Cours de l’IHES”, he will talk about “Sharp threshold phenomena in statistical physics”.

IHES is proud to welcome him as a new permanent professor, the first to focus on probability.