Yilin Wang is awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant

IHES junior professor Yilin Wang has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to explore new connections between random conformal geometry and Teichmüller theory. She is among the 400 young scientists recognized by the ERC in 2023.

The funding will be about 1,5 million euros, given over five years, and it will allow Yilin Wang to start her team, organize conferences, and continue her groundbreaking work on this mathematically interdisciplinary subject.

Despite having known important developments over the past few years, the connections between these two lines of research have only been discovered recently and remain largely unexplored.

Yilin Wang, who found a surprising and close link between the Loewner energy – a concept in random conformal geometry – and the Kähler potential of the Weil-Petersson metric on the universal Teichmüller space – a concept in Teichmüller theory, is planning to use her ERC Starting Grant to break new grounds in exploring these links and going beyond, while combining techniques from probability theory, complex analysis, geometric analysis, Kähler geometry, spectral theory, etc. She named her research project RaConTeich to stress her aim to establish the connections between the fundamental concepts in random conformal geometry and Teichmüller theory.

She believes that a better and deeper understanding of those links will bring significant developments to both fields. Such advancements also carry the promise to shed new light on several areas in mathematical physics – such as statistical mechanics, conformal field theory, and string theory – to which many of the questions fueling this line of research pertain.

“I am very happy for this great opportunity to carry out my research and to develop my team. I look forward to five years of exciting work with my colleagues and collaborators exploring new grounds in mathematics!”- said Yilin Wang upon receiving the news of the award.

IHES is very proud that Yilin Wang, who joined the Institute in 2022, has obtained this prestigious grant, which will bring new occasions for scientific discussions and collaborations that will have an incredibly positive impact on the Institute’s activity.

ERC Starting Grants are awarded to talented early-career scientists with 2 to 7 years of experience as supervised researchers after their Ph.D., and who have shown potential to make important research contributions independently.