Geoffrey Grimmett | |
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Born | Geoffrey Richard Grimmett 20 December 1950 [1] Birmingham, England, UK |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | Merton College, Oxford (BA, DPhil) |
Spouse | Rosine Bonay (m. 1986) |
Children | Hugo Grimmett [2] |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Random Fields and Random Graphs (1974) |
Doctoral advisor | |
Website | www |
Geoffrey Richard Grimmett FRS [6] OLY (born 20 December 1950) [1] is an English mathematician known for his work on the mathematics of random systems arising in probability theory [7] [8] [9] and statistical mechanics, especially percolation theory [10] and the contact process. [11] [3] He is the Professor of Mathematical Statistics in the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and was the Master of Downing College, Cambridge, from 2013 to 2018. [12]
Grimmett was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and Merton College, Oxford. He graduated in 1971, and completed his DPhil in 1974 [13] under the supervision of John Hammersley and Dominic Welsh. [5]
Grimmett served as the IBM Research Fellow at New College, Oxford, from 1974 to 1976 before moving to the University of Bristol. [1] [14] He was appointed Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge in 1992, becoming a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. [15] He was Director of the Statistical Laboratory from 1994 to 2000, Head of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS) from 2002 to 2007, and is a trustee of the Rollo Davidson Prize. [16]
Grimmett is particularly recognised for his achievements in the rigorous theory of disordered physical systems. [6] Especially influential is his work on and around percolation theory, the contact model for stochastic spatial epidemics, and the random-cluster model, a class that includes the Ising/Potts models of ferromagnetism. [6] His monograph on percolation is a standard work in a core area of probability, and is widely cited. [6] His breadth within probability is emphasized by his important contributions to probabilistic combinatorics and probabilistic number theory. [6]
In October 2013 he was appointed Master of Downing College, Cambridge, succeeding Barry Everitt. [2] He ended his term as Master on 30 September 2018, being replaced by Alan Bookbinder. [17]
He was appointed Chair of the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research in September 2020. [18] He was succeeded by Catherine Hobbs on September 1 2023. [19]
Grimmett was awarded the Rollo Davidson Prize in 1989 [20] and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. [6]
Grimmett is the son of Benjamin J Grimmett and Patricia W (Lewis) Grimmett. [21]
He competed at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal as a member of the Great Britain Men's Foil Team, finishing 6th. [22]
In statistical physics and mathematics, percolation theory describes the behavior of a network when nodes or links are added. This is a geometric type of phase transition, since at a critical fraction of addition the network of small, disconnected clusters merge into significantly larger connected, so-called spanning clusters. The applications of percolation theory to materials science and in many other disciplines are discussed here and in the articles Network theory and Percolation.
In physics, chemistry, and materials science, percolation refers to the movement and filtering of fluids through porous materials. It is described by Darcy's law. Broader applications have since been developed that cover connectivity of many systems modeled as lattices or graphs, analogous to connectivity of lattice components in the filtration problem that modulates capacity for percolation.
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Béla Bollobás FRS is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul Erdős since the age of 14.
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Gareth Owen Roberts FRS FLSW is a statistician and applied probabilist. He is Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics and Director of the Centre for Research in Statistical Methodology (CRiSM) at the University of Warwick. He is an established authority on the stability of Markov chains, especially applied to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) theory methodology for a wide range of latent statistical models with applications in spatial statistics, infectious disease epidemiology and finance.
Martin Thomas Barlow FRS FRSC is a British mathematician who is professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia in Canada since 1992.
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