Oded Schramm

Ramadas Ramakrishnan Trivandrum ramadas at ictp.it
Thu Sep 4 08:21:08 CEST 2008


With profound sadness and shock, we are writing to inform you that our
colleague and friend, Oded Schramm, died in a tragic hiking accident
yesterday, September 1st.

Oded was a towering figure, an extraordinary mathematician, widely considered
to be the most influential probabilist in the world.  His revolutionary work
completely transformed our understanding of critical processes in two
dimensions, tying probability theory to analysis and topology like never
before.

Oded worked at Microsoft Research for the last ten years. He received the
Erdős Prize in Mathematics in 1996, the Salem Prize in 2001, the Clay
Research Award in 2002, and the Pólya Prize. He was elected as a  member
of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2008. Oded gave many key
lectures, including plenary addresses in the 2004 European Congress of
Mathematics and the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians, as
well as the 2006 Abel lecture.  On the Theory Group webpage, Oded listed
his interests as:

Percolation, two dimensional random systems, critical systems, SLE,
conformal mappings, dynamical random systems, discrete and coarse
geometry, mountains.


Oded was a remarkable individual: always calm, humble, generous with his
insights and ideas, the best collaborator one could hope for and the person
who could always be relied upon. Our heart is with Oded’s family. He
will be sorely missed by all who knew him.

--Yuval Peres








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