Scientific activity
Hugo Duminil-Copin is awarded the European Mathematical Society Prize
Hugo Duminil-Copin, holder of the IDEX Paris-Saclay Chair and soon-to-be new permanent professor at IHES, is among the 10 laureates of the 2016 European Mathematical Society (EMS) Prize. Every four years, the EMS chooses ten of the best mathematicians whose age is less than 35, and who work in Europe or have a European nationality. Wendelin Werner, Cédric Villani and Artur Avila have all been awarded this prize before receiving the Fields medal.
Born in 1985, Hugo Duminil-Copin is a probabilist. He obtained a teaching diploma in mathematics, “agrégation”, from École Normale Supérieure. He was a PhD student of Stanislas Smirnov at the University of Geneva, where he obtained his PhD in 2012 and where he is now a professor. In 2015 he was selected for the Peccot course of Collège de France.
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.
