Gregory F. Lawler
The University of Chicago
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Primary Section: 32, Applied Mathematical Sciences Secondary Section: 11, Mathematics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2013)
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Biosketch
Gregory F. Lawler is the George Wells Beadle Distinguished Service Professor in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Chicago. He is a probabilist who specializes in random walk and Brownian motion with a particular emphasis on models arising in statistical physics. He was born in Alexandria, Virginia in 1955, graduated from the University of Virginia in 1976, and received a doctorate from Princeton University in mathematics in 1979. He was on the faculties of Duke University and Cornell University before joining the University of Chicago in 2006. He is a co-founder of Electronic Journal of Probability and has served as editor for Annals of Probability and Journal of the American Mathematical Society. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Mathematical Society, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Research Interests
Lawler studies fractal and geometric properties of random walk and Brownian motion both for their own sake and to help analyze atypical behavior that arises in models with very strong interactions. These models often arise in the study of critical phenoma in statistical physics. Walks with self-repulsion such as the self-avoiding walk, the loop-erased walk, and interfaces of random fields are of particular interest. In planar models where there are conformally invariant limits, complex analysis plays a strong role. Recent work has centered on planar continuum models such as the Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE) and the Brownian loop measure.
