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TORONTO, JANUARY 9, 2009- The Directors of the three Institutes,
CRM, Fields and PIMS are pleased to announce that Martin Barlow
from UBC is the recipient of the 2009 CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize.
Martin Barlow is a leading figure in probability and the
leading international expert in diffusion on fractals and
other disordered media. In addition, the impact of his work
has been important in such diverse fields as partial differential
equations, including major progress on the De Giorgi conjecture,
stochastic differential equations, the mathematical finance
of electricity pricing, filtration enlargement and branching
measure diffusions.
Already in the 1980's, Martin Barlow settled a long open problem
of probability theory, by providing necessary and sufficient
conditions (the latter with J. Hawkes) for the continuity
of local times of Lévy processes. This was the resolution
of a thirty-year old problem which had attracted the efforts
of Hale Trotter, Ronald Getoor and Harry Kersten among others.
His conditions have paved the way for the study of the connection
between local times and Gaussian processes.
In the 1990's his detailed study of diffusions on a variety
of fractals and fractal-like sets opened a new area of study
in probability, making him the leading international expert
in the behaviour of diffusions on fractals and other disordered
media. The study of the diffusion on the Sierpinski carpet,
started with Ed Perkins and then Richard Bass in 1986, served
as a testing ground for diffusion in highly inhomogeneous
media, a domain of interest for the physics community which
is now within mathematical reach. Barlow remains at the leading
edge of this research with his recent work giving best possible
results for the behaviour of transition probabilities for
random walks on super-critical percolation clusters. The pioneering
papers on the diffusion on the Sierpinski carpet attracted
to the domain experts in Dirichlet forms, diffusions on manifolds
and statistical mechanics. Martin Barlow currently is at the
forefront of a program to study the transport properties of
a broad class of graphs and manifolds.
Martin Barlow received his undergraduate degree from Cambridge
University in 1975 and completed his Doctoral degree with
David Williams at the University College of Swansea in Wales
in 1978. He held Royal Society University Research Fellowship
at Cambridge University from 1985 to 1992, when he joined
the Mathematics Department at University of British Columbia.
He currently is Professor of Mathematics at UBC. He has held
a number of visiting professorships at leading universities
including University of Tokyo, Cornell University, Imperial
College, London, and Université de Paris.
Martin Barlow gave an invited lecture at the 1990 ICM in
Kyoto and was an invited lecturer at the prestigious St. Flour
Summer School in 1995. In 2008 he received the Jeffery-Williams
Prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society. Other past distinctions
include the Rollo Davidson Prize from Cambridge University,
the Junior Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society.
He has been a leader of the international probability community,
as a lead organizer of numerous conferences, Associate Editor
of all the top probability journals and Editor-in-Chief of
the Electronic Communications in probability. He is a Fellow
of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics since 1995, of
the Royal Society of Canada since 1998 and in 2006 was elected
Fellow of the Royal Society (London).
Previous recipients of the prize are H.S.M. (Donald) Coxeter,
George A. Elliott, James Arthur, Robert V. Moody, Stephen
A. Cook, Israel Michael Sigal, William T. Tutte, John B. Friedlander,
John McKay, Edwin Perkins, Donald A. Dawson, David Boyd, Nicole
Tomczak-Jaegermann, Joel Feldman and Allan Borodin.
Established in 1994, the CRM-Fields Prize recognizes exceptional
research in the mathematical sciences. In 2005, PIMS became
an equal partner in the prize, and the name was changed to
the CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize. A committee appointed by the three
institutes chooses the recipient.
The CRM-Fields-PIMS prize is intended to be the premier mathematics
prize in Canada. The winner receive a monetary award, and
an invitation to present a lecture at each institute during
the semester when the award is announced. The prize recognizes
exceptional achievement in the mathematical sciences.
To learn more about the prize, please visit www.fields.utoronto.ca/programs/scientific/crm-fields-pims/
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