Future Science Prize Symposium 2024
Published:
Two blog posts in one week!
Today I went to the mathematics session of the Future Science Prize Symposium. The four talks given were
- A Glimpse at Statistical Physics from Percolation - Jian Ding 丁剑
- From natural numbers to infinity categories - Yifeng Liu 刘一峰
- 3d Quantum Field Theories and Langlands Duality - Hiraku Nakajima
- Evariste Galois and Communication Technology - Efim Zelmanov
If you checked out this blog, or spoke with me about mathematics at length any time in the past year, you must have heard of percolation theory. Indeed, Ding, who is one of the most prolific young probabilist right now, was the main reason that I registered for this symposium. I think he was an excellent choice by the organising committee. Percolation is almost made for its main ideas to be conveyed over a 30 minute talk.
Ding’s talk was not as elementary as I had expected though… Instead, he dived right into the main ideas of several proofs in percolation and even touched on first passage times and the Ising model. As time was running out, he quickly scrolled through some slides and I see that he had even made the slides for the Gaussian Free Field and Liouville Quantum Gravity.
As an overly eager undergraduate student often does I found him after the event and asked some questions but we didn’t get to talk much since he was just exhausted after the presentation and discussion. I also shamelessly got a picture with him lmao. But I think I should have brought my copy of Grimmett’s Percolation and let him sign instead.