Allan Sly (mathematician)

Allan Murray Sly is an Australian mathematician and statistician specializing in probability theory. He is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018.

Education and career

Sly was a member of the Australian team at the 1999 and 2000 International Mathematical Olympiads, earning an honourable mention and a silver medal respectively.[1] He attended Radford College, where he was dux of the year in 2000.[2] He then studied at Australian National University, winning the University Medal in 2004,[3] earning a bachelor's degree, and in 2006 earning a M.Phil.[4]

He completed his Ph.D. in 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, Spatial and Temporal Mixing of Gibbs Measures, was supervised by Elchanan Mossel.[5]

After postdoctoral study at Microsoft Research, he joined the statistics faculty at Berkeley in 2011, and moved to Princeton University as a professor of mathematics in 2016.[6][7]

Contributions

Sly's work has included research on finding clusters in networks, the use of information percolation to analyze the "cutoff" phenomenon in which Markov chains exhibit a sharp transition to their stationary distribution, embeddings of random sequences, and phase transitions for random instances of the satisfiability problem.[4]

Recognition

Sly won a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2012.[8] He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018 for "applying probability theory to resolve long-standing problems in statistical physics and computer science".[4][7] He is the winner of the 2019 Loeve prize.[9]

References
  1. Allan Sly, International Mathematical Olympiad, retrieved 2 December 2018
  2. Allan Sly (2000) – Macarthur Fellow 2018, Radford Collegians, 2018, retrieved 2 December 2018
  3. University Medallists from 1970 and winners of the University Prize 1963–1979 (PDF), Australian National University, archived from the original (PDF) on 28 March 2018, retrieved 2 December 2018
  4. Allan Sly, MacArthur Foundation, 2018, retrieved 2 December 2018
  5. Allan Sly at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  6. Two Berkeley alums win MacArthur 'genius' awards, UC Berkeley Public Affairs, 5 October 2018, retrieved 2 December 2018
  7. Allan Sly named 2018 MacArthur Fellow, Princeton University Department of Mathematics, 2018, retrieved 2 December 2018
  8. Q&A: Allan Sly on probability theory and random processes, UC Berkeley Public Affairs, 15 February 2012, retrieved 2 December 2018
  9. Loeve Prize, retrieved 14 July 2019
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