Yilin Wang, first junior professor at IHES

Press release – 12 May 2022

On the occasion of the International day for women in mathematics, IHES is glad to announce that Yiling Wang will join the Institute as a junior professor.

Yilin Wang will join the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) as a junior professor of mathematics in June 2022.

The young mathematician becomes the first holder of a prestigious position of junior professor at IHES, funded by the Simons Foundation and given to researchers at the beginning of their career, who have distinguished themselves by their remarkable talent in the discipline.

Born in 1991 in China, Yilin Wang moved to France for her graduate studies. After entering the École normale supérieure of Paris, she obtained a Master of Science in Probability and Statistics from Université Paris-Saclay. After graduating in 2019 with a PhD from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) of Zurich, under the supervision of Wendelin Werner (Fields Medal 2006), Yilin Wang obtained the position of C.L.E. Moore Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She then became a Strauch Postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute of Berkeley (MSRI) in California.

Yilin Wang is currently working on topics at the interface of Complex analysis and Probability theory. Her current research focuses on themes that aim at enlightening the connections among Random conformal geometry, Geometric function theory, and Teichmüller theory.

In 2022, she received the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize for innovative and far-reaching work on the Loewner energy of planar curves. “I spend most of my time playing with Loewner energy, Schramm-Loewner evolutions, Gaussian free field, Weil-Petersson Teichmüller space, determinants of Laplacians, Brownian loop measure, hyperbolic spaces, etc” says Yilin Wang.

IHES Director Emmanuel Ullmo comments: “We are proud to welcome such a talented mathematician to this new junior faculty position, which we have just created at IHES. Her remarkable research on the probabilistic and analytic aspects of Loewner energy, for which she has already been awarded several prizes, testifies to the excellence of this young scientist’s work.”

The mathematician is also delighted with this opportunity: “Joining IHES will allow me to benefit from an extremely favorable professional environment, both to advance my current research work and to establish new collaborations. With this new position, I am convinced that I will have the best conditions to develop new approaches to a number of problems.”