[cmath] Gordon Slade winner of 2010 CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize

[Alejandro Adem]

Gordon Slade Awarded 2010 CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize

The Directors of the three Institutes, CRM, Fields and PIMS, are
pleased to announce that Gordon Slade from the University of British
Columbia is the recipient of the 2010 CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize. The award
recognises his outstanding work in rigorous statistical mechanics and
probability.  He is renowned for developing a technique known as the
lace expansion into a systematic calculus which he has applied to
diverse and famous problems including self-avoiding walk, percolation,
branched polymers, random graphs, and numerical techniques for the
exact enumeration of self-avoiding walks.

His results address some of the most difficult problems in central
areas of probability and statistical physics.  These are questions
motivated by physical problems which are easy to state (what is the
average length of an n-step self-avoiding walk?), but notoriously
difficult to solve.

Gordon Slade received his undergraduate degree from the University of
Toronto in 1977 and completed his Doctoral degree with Lon Rosen and
Joel Feldman at the University of British Columbia in 1984. He was
Lecturer at the University of Virginia from 1985 to 1986.  In 1986 he
joined the faculty of McMaster University and since 1999 he has been
Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia.

Gordon Slade has been a leader in Canadian Mathematics, having been an
organiser of the (98-99) thematic year in probability and its
applications at the Fields Institute, co-organiser of the recent
CRM-PIMS Programme Challenges and Perspectives in Probability (08-09).
He has served on scientific panels of the Fields and Pacific
Institutes and is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the
Canadian Journal of Mathematics. His stature as one of the world's
leading probabilists and mathematical physicists was underlined by his
1994 invitation to the International Congress of Mathematics and his
2004 invitation to lecture at the prestigious St. Flour Summer School.