Ofer Zeitouni
Weizmann Institute of Science
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Primary Section: 32, Applied Mathematical Sciences Secondary Section: 11, Mathematics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2020)
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Biosketch
Ofer Zeitouni is the Herman P. Taubman Professor of Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel and a Global Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute, NYU. He is a probabilist with broad interests, who has contributed to the theory of large deviations, random matrix theory, motion in random media, the study of path properties of random walk and Brownian motion, and more recently to the study of logarithmically correlated fields. He is motivated by, and contributed to, applications of probability theory to engineering and statistical physics. Zeitouni was born and raised in Haifa, Israel. He received all his degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, obtaining a PhD in 1986 (with Moshe Zakai as adviser). After post docs at Brown University and at MIT, he joined the Technion in 1989, and moved to the Weizmann Institute in 2007. Between 2002 and 2012, he was faculty at the School of Mathematics, University of Minnesota. He spoke at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing, is a fellow of the IEEE, AMS, IMS and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Research Interests
I am interested in many aspects of probability theory and its applications. My earlier work was centered around filtering theory and the theory of large deviations, and then I became interested in motion in random media, path properties of random walk and Brownian motion, and random matrices. In recent years, I have focused on the study of logarithmic correlated fields and their extremes. A prototype of such fields is the two-dimensional Gaussian free field, but they show up also in the study of random matrices, the study of planar Brownian motion and random walk, and the study of random polynomials. Another topic of recent interest is the study of non-Normal matrices under small perturbations, where instability phenomena are common. Other current research interests involve the study of the cover time of planar graphs by random walk, and two dimensional random walk in random environment.
