The Department of Mathematics is pleased to announce that Duncan Dauvergne and Bálint Virág, together with Janosch Ortmann (University of Quebec at Montreal, formerly a postdoctoral fellow in the Department), have been awarded the prestigious George Pólya Prize in Mathematics by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).
Established in 1992, the George Pólya Prize in Mathematics is one of the leading honors in the field, recognizing mathematicians whose research has made a significant impact in areas that interested George Pólya but are not covered by SIAM’s other Pólya Prizes. These areas include approximation theory, complex analysis, number theory, orthogonal polynomials, probability theory, and the broader processes of mathematical discovery and learning.
Duncan, Janosch, and Bálint are recognized for the discovery of the directed landscape, a fundamental geometric object underlying the KPZ universality class. Jeremy Quastel, a leading expert in the field, notes that this work “constructs the universal scaling limit for directed metrics and geodesic paths in last passage percolation models, providing the key geometric asymptotic object in the KPZ universality class.”
Congratulations to all on this outstanding achievement.