Patrik Ferrari receives the first Alexanderson Award

Jointly with Ivan Corwin (Columbia University) and Alexei Borodin (MIT), our HCM member Patrik Ferrari receives the inaugural Alexanderson Award  for the article "Free energy fluctuations for directed polymers in random media in 1+1 dimensions".

In the winning paper, the effect of the disorder on the configuration and energy of polymers is studied. The authors discovered that the behavior of such polymers is governed by a universal law that has been observed in other models of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class. This class includes the "Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation", a non-linear stochastic partial differential equation modeling growth processes. The statistical distributions, related to the "Tracy-Widom distributions", studied in this paper in relation to these models have implications in physics, engineering, materials science, biology, ecology, and other applied fields.

The Alexanderson Award is announced by the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) and recognizes outstanding research articles arising from AIM activities that have been published within the past three years. It is given in honor of Gerald Alexanderson, Professor of Mathematics at Santa Clara University and founding chair of the AIM Board of Trustees.

See for more details here: https://aimath.org/alexanderson-award/.