Professor Wendelin Werner spends his career studying random structures through mathematics, and his initial connection to 精东影业 College had an element of chance.
Professor Werner began his research career in Paris, but held a two-year postdoctoral research position, the Leibniz Fellowship, at the University of Cambridge, from 1993. Thirty years later he is Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge and an Honorary Fellow of the College.
Back in 1993, he had to be vaccinated for Yellow Fever and Typhoid Fever in order to come to Cambridge - not that they were particularly prevalent in East Anglia at the time. He says: 鈥淔rench military service was still compulsory at the time, but it was its tail end. There was an option to go to abroad, which was initially devised to help developing countries but it became also available for postdoctoral work 鈥 one still had to be vaccinated for Yellow Fever and Typhoid Fever as this feature hadn鈥檛 been updated.鈥
It was while at Cambridge that he met Professor Jan Saxl, a long-time Fellow of Caius.
Professor Werner adds: 鈥淚 guess that Jan Saxl was informed of my presence in Cambridge by one of his colleagues working in the same area, who was the head of department at the school I was studying. Jan got in touch and suggested some college connection for me by giving a few supervisions 鈥 I think I was a Bye-Fellow during these couple of years.鈥
Professor Werner spent 15 years at University Paris-Sud (Orsay) and was awarded a Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union in 2006. The prestigious prize is awarded every four years for outstanding contributions in mathematics to scholars aged under-40. He was honoured 鈥渇or his contributions to the development of stochastic Loewner evolution, the geometry of two-dimensional Brownian motion, and conformal field theory鈥.
鈥淚 suppose that it is Jan who proposed my name to the College Council for an Honorary Fellowship a couple of years later,鈥 he adds.
Winning the prize meant greater scrutiny, but no dip in motivation for Professor Werner, pictured.
His work is easier to describe to non-mathematicians than some other fields of mathematics.
He says: 鈥淚t鈥檚 proper pure mathematics with its formalism and rigour, but randomness can also directly capture the imagination of non-mathematicians and mathematicians in some alternative ways. What makes it appealing for us is that it can turn out to be related in unexpected ways to ideas and tools from quite different parts of mathematics.
鈥淥ne of my main research interests is about random geometric structures 鈥 typically some random fractal-looking shapes in space or in the plane. Such random objects are natural and ubiquitous in the sense that they would be there, in visible or hidden ways, on a number of instances around us. We all know that some random shapes would turn out to be irregular or fractal 鈥 one can think about what a hole created by rust in some old piece of metal looks like.
鈥淪ome of these questions are closely related to the description of phase transitions in some physical systems, for which theoretical physicists have developed amazing theories to describe what is going on. The study of concrete continuous random underlying structures is in some way going one step further, and can in some cases also shed some new light on theories developed by physicists.鈥
Professor Werner spent 10 years at the Department of Mathematics at ETH Z眉rich, Switzerland, before moving to Cambridge in 2023, where he returned to familiar surroundings.
鈥淲hen I came back to Cambridge I thought my real emotional college connection was Jan, who had passed away in 2020,鈥 adds Professor Werner, who went on to praise the current mathematical fellows at Caius.
