Martin Hairer: Fields Medalist
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Volume 43 • Issue 6 IMS Bulletin September 2014 Martin Hairer: Fields Medalist The Fields Medals are the most prestigious awards in the field of mathematics, CONTENTS awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union. Among this year’s 1 Fields Medal: Martin Hairer four recipients is IMS member Martin Hairer (University of Warwick, UK), who deliv- ered a Medallion lecture at the IMS annual meeting in Sydney in July. 2-3 Members’ News: Michael Jordan; Susie Bayarri; Terry Ofer Zeitouni explains some of the background to Martin’s work: Speed; Karen Kafadar; John Martin Hairer of the University of Warwick is one Stufken; ISBA Fellows; ASA of the four recipients of the 2014 Fields medal, awarded Fellows on August 13 during the International Congress of 4 Annual Meeting photos Mathematicians in Seoul. The citation reads:Martin Hairer is awarded a Fields Medal for his outstanding 6 IMS student members win Badge Stiftung/Peter Tschira Klaus contributions to the theory of stochastic partial differential Martin Hairer Data Mining Cup (above) and the equations, and in particular for the creation of a theory Fields Medal 7 Hadley Wickham: How are of regularity structures for such equations. (left) Data Science and Statistics For probabilists and statisticians, the solution of a different? stochastic ordinary differential equations involves Itô’s theory; while extremely powerful 8 Student Puzzle Corner 5 and useful, Itô’s method is crucially based on the martingale property of Brownian 10 Robert Adler: TOPOS part 2 motion and does not generalize well to situations where the noise depends both on time and space. The latter is what happens in the case of stochastic partial differential 12 Recent papers: Annals of equations; one often gets from physical considerations equations with terms that are Probability; Annals of Applied Probability not well defined, because they involve non-linear functions of distributions. Particularly 3 well known examples are the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation and the so called Φ4 Meeting report: The 13 equation of quantum field theory. London Workshop Hairer’s theory of regularity structures allows one to give a sense to these equations. 14 Women faculty in stat/ First, one mollifies the noise as to obtain a classical SPDE. The limit as the mollification biostat departments is turned off, however, cannot be directly taken because of divergences. Hairer invented 16 International Women in a method that expands the solutions in a basis (determined by the equation) and then Mathematics website; renormalizes (a finite number of terms in the expansion) in order to give sense to the IMS Travel Award winners limit as the mollification is tuned off. As a result, one obtains the solution of the original 17 Meeting report: IISA SPDE as the limit of classical solutions of (modified) equation driven by mollified noise. The extra correction term is reminiscent of the Wong-Zakai correction term in the theory 18 IMS meetings of SDEs, but the computation of the correction term requires the full power of Hairer’s 20 Other meetings theory and is much more subtle. 23 Employment Opportunities In addition to this major achievement, Hairer made other spectacular contributions to the theory of SPDEs. In particular, together with Jonathan Mattingly of Duke University 25 International Calendar he introduced the notion of asymptotic strong Feller property and used it in a proof of 27 Information for Advertisers ergodicity for two dimensional stochastic Navier-Stokes equations. Congratulations, Martin, on this wonderful achievement. Read it online at http://bulletin.imstat.org You can read a longer profile of Martin Hairer in the Simons Foundation Quanta Magazine at www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-in-mathematical-noise-one-who-heard-music/ IMSBulletin 2 . IMS Bulletin Volume 43 . Issue 6 Volume 43 • Issue 6 September 2014 IMS Members’ News ISSN 1544-1881 Cognitive “Nobel” prize awarded to Michael Jordan Contact information IMS Fellow Michael Jordan has been awarded the 2015 David E. IMS Bulletin Editor: Anirban DasGupta Rumelhart Prize For Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations Assistant Editor: Tati Howell of Human Cognition, a prestigious $100,000 prize that is sometimes Contributing Editors: Robert Adler, Peter referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Cognitive Science” (http:// Bickel, Stéphane Boucheron, David Hand, Vlada Limic, Xiao-Li Meng, Dimitris rumelhartprize.org/). Michael has pioneered some of the most Politis, Terry Speed and Hadley Wickham highly cited and most influential computational models of learning, Michael Jordan inference and control in both biological and machine systems. He Contact the IMS Bulletin by email: is Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Statistics, and of Electrical Engineering and e [email protected] w http://bulletin.imstat.org Computer Science, at UC Berkeley. He holds a BS in Psychology from Louisiana State https://www.facebook.com/IMSTATI University, an MS in Mathematics and Statistics at Arizona State University, and a PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, earned under the supervision Contact the IMS regarding your dues, membership, subscriptions, orders or of David Rumelhart. After completing his degree in 1985, and a two-year postdoc at the change of address: University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Michael was appointed assistant professor at MIT in IMS Dues and Subscriptions Office 1988. In 1998, he joined Berkeley’s Computer Science and Statistics Departments. 9650 Rockville Pike, Suite L3503A Michael has received many honors, including his election as a member of both the Bethesda, MD 20814-3998 USA National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as being t 877-557-4674 [toll-free in USA] named fellow of numerous professional organizations, including IMS and the Cognitive t +1 216 295 5661[international] Science Society. f +1 301 634 7099 A more extensive profile of Michael’s pioneering work is on the Rumelhart Prize website, e [email protected] at http://rumelhartprize.org/?page_id=505. Contact the IMS regarding any other matter, including advertising, copyright Susie Bayarri: 1956–2014 permission, offprint orders, copyright IMS Fellow M.J. Susie Bayarri passed away on August 19 in Valencia, Spain. Susie was transfer, societal matters, meetings, fellows a prominent Bayesian statistician, a former President of ISBA, and had just been made nominations and content of publications: an ISBA Fellow (see page 3) before she died. She worked for most of her career at the Executive Director, Elyse Gustafson University of Valencia, and held an adjunct professorship at Duke University’s ISDS. She IMS Business Office was an IMS, ISBA and ASA Fellow, and an elected member of the ISI; she won the Frank PO Box 22718, Beachwood OH 44122, USA Wilcoxon Award and Jack Youden Prize. Christian Robert described her “rich and conta- t 877-557-4674 [toll-free in USA] gious laugh” in his blog, and posted the affectionate poem Kerrie Mengersen performed at t +1 216 295 5661[international] the ISBA Cancun cabaret, which contains the toast, “To Susie, Queen of Bayes!” f +1 216 295 5661 A full obituary will appear in the next issue. e [email protected] Executive Committee Terry Speed receives 2014 Sacks Award Kafadar appointed to forensic panel President: Erwin Bolthausen Terry Speed is this year’s recipient of Karen Kafadar, who has just become [email protected] the 2014 NISS Jerome Sacks Award for professor and chair of the department of President-Elect: Richard Davis [email protected] Cross-Disciplinary Research. The citation statistics at the University of Virginia, has Past President: Bin Yu commended him as “a pioneer in the been appointed to the US Forensic Science [email protected] development and application of statistical Standards Board (FSSB). The panel of Treasurer: Jean Opsomer methods for the analysis of biomedical and experts will identify and foster development [email protected] genomic data. His work exemplifies the best and adoption of standards and guidelines Program Secretary: Judith Rousseau [email protected] of applied statistics in cross-disciplinary for the nation’s forensic science community. Executive Secretary: Aurore Delaigle research and is notable for its creativity, rigor, Visit the National Institute for Standards of [email protected] and relevance.” Technology website for more information. = access published papers online September . 2014 IMS Bulletin . 3 IMS Journals and Publications Annals of Statistics: Peter Hall and Runze Li http://imstat.org/aos http://projecteuclid.org/aos Annals of Applied Statistics: Stephen Fienberg IMS Election results http://imstat.org/aoas http://projecteuclid.org/aoas New ISBA Fellows elected Annals of Probability: Krzysztof Burdzy http://imstat.org/aop ISBA, the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, has elected 17 new Fellows, all of http://projecteuclid.org/aop whom are IMS members and/or fellows. Congratulations to: M. J. (Susie) Bayarri [who has Annals of Applied Probability: Timo Seppäläinen , Alicia Carriquiry, Merlise Clyde, Dipak Dey, David http://imstat.org/aap just passed away: see note on page 2] http://projecteuclid.org/aoap Draper, Stephen E. Fienberg, Edward I. George, Michael Jordan, Joseph B. Kadane, Kerrie Statistical Science: Peter Green Mengersen, Eugenio Regazzini, Sylvia Richardson, Christian Robert, Judith Rousseau, http://imstat.org/sts http://projecteuclid.org/ss Fabrizio Ruggeri,