Oded Schramm


Oded Schramm was an Israeli-American mathematician known for the invention of the Schramm–Loewner evolution and for working at the intersection of conformal field theory and probability theory.

Biography

Schramm was born in Jerusalem. His father, Michael Schramm, was a biochemistry professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He attended Hebrew University, where he received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science in 1986 and his master's degree in 1987, under the supervision of Gil Kalai. He then received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1990 under the supervision of William Thurston.
After receiving his doctorate, he worked for two years at the University of California, San Diego, and then had a permanent position at the Weizmann Institute from 1992 to 1999. In 1999 he moved to the Theory Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, where he remained for the rest of his life.
He and his wife had two children, Tselil and Pele.
On September 1, 2008, Schramm fell to his death while solo climbing Guye Peak, north of Snoqualmie Pass in Washington.

Research

A constant theme in Schramm's research was the exploration of relations between discrete models and their continuous scaling limits, which for a number of models turn out to be conformally invariant.
Schramm's most significant contribution was the invention of Schramm–Loewner evolution, a tool which has paved the way for mathematical proofs of conjectured scaling limit relations on models from statistical mechanics such as self-avoiding random walk and percolation. This technique has had a profound impact on the field. It has been recognized by many awards to Schramm and others, including a Fields Medal to Wendelin Werner, who was one of Schramm's principal collaborators, along with Gregory Lawler. The New York Times wrote in his obituary:
Schramm's doctorate was in complex analysis, but he made contributions in many other areas of pure mathematics, although self-taught in those areas. Frequently he would prove a result by himself before reading the literature to obtain an appropriate credit. Often his proof was original or more elegant than the original.
Besides conformally invariant planar processes and SLE, he made fundamental contributions to several topics: