Oded Schramm Memoriam
Oded Schramm died September 1 in a tragic hiking accident on Guye Peak, Washington. Oded was an extraordinary mathematician, who transformed our understanding of critical processes in two dimensions through his introduction of the Stochastic Loewner evolution, tying probability theory to complex analysis in a completely novel way. He also made fundamental contributions to circle packings, random spanning trees, percolation, noise sensitivity of Boolean functions, random permutations and metric geometry.
Oded studied in the Hebrew University and at Princeton, and then worked at the Weizmann Institute and since 1999, at Microsoft Research. He received the Erdos Prize in Mathematics in 1996, the Salem Prize in 2001, the Clay Research Award in 2002, the Poincare Prize in 2003, the Loeve Prize in 2003, the Polya Prize in 2006 and the Ostrowski Prize in 2007. He was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2008.
Oded gave many key lectures, including plenary addresses in the 2004 European Congress of Mathematics and the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians, as well as the 2005 Coxeter Lecture Series at the Fields Institute and the 2006 Abel lecture. On the Microsoft theory group webpage, Oded listed his interests: Percolation, two dimensional random systems, critical systems, SLE, conformal mappings, dynamical random systems, discrete and coarse geometry, mountains.
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