Scott R. Sheffield

Biosketch

Scott Sheffield is the Leighton Family Professor at the MIT Department of Mathematics. He graduated from Harvard University in 1998 with an A.B. and A.M. in mathematics. In 2003, he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, UC Berkeley and IAS Princeton. He joined the faculty of New York University in 2005 and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008. Awards include the Loève Prize, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Rollo Davidson Prize. Jointly with Jason Miller he received the Clay Research Award and the Leonard Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics. In 2024, he received the Henri Poincaré Prize from the International Association of Mathematical Physics.

Research Interests

Scott Sheffield is a mathematician working primarily in probability theory and mathematical physics. He has studied random surfaces (including Liouvile quantum gravity surfaces), random fractals curves (including the Schramm-Loewner evolution), random trees (including continuum random trees), random distributions (including the Gaussian free field) and many other natural constructions with a geometric flavor. Many of his works describe surprising relationships between different fractal objects, such the mating of continuum random trees to produce Liouville quantum gravity surfaces decorated by SLE curves. He has more recently studied relationships between Yang-Mills gauge theory and the theory of random surfaces.