Allan Sly (mathematician)

Allan Sly (* 1982 ) is an Australian mathematician.

Sly was on the Australian team at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1999 and 2000 (where he received a silver medal) and studied at Radford College and the Australian National University with a bachelor's and master's degree (2006). Sly received his PhD in 2009 from the University of California, Berkeley , under Elchanan Mossel , with a dissertation on a topic of probability theory ( Spatial and Temporal Mixing of Gibbs Measures ). As a post-doctoral student he was at Microsoft Research . From 2011 he was an assistant professor in the statistics department at Berkeley and in 2016 he became a professor at Princeton University .

The focus of his work is on stochastic processes in networks in various contexts such as statistical physics ( Ising model ) and theoretical computer science. His significant contributions include the determination of thresholds for the recognition of patterns in the sparse stochastic block model, groundbreaking work on the cutoff of Markov chains in the Glauber dynamics of Ising models, i.e. a sharp transition to the equilibrium distribution using percolation of Information and the construction of embedding random sequences in random sequences. He proved a long open problem in computer science, the satisfiability conjecture in the random k-SAT problem (random k-SAT) for large k (existence of a phase transition). He developed new methods with a wide range of applications such as information percolation.

In 2012 he became a Sloan Research Fellow. In 2018 he received a MacArthur Fellowship for the application of probability theory to long-standing open problems in statistical physics and computer science . In 2019 he received the Loève Prize .

Fonts (selection)

• with Eyal Lubetzky: Cutoff phenomena for random walks on random regular graphs , Duke Mathematical Journal, Volume 153, 2010, pp. 475-510
• Computational Transition at the Uniqueness Threshold , Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer, 2010, pp. 287-296, Arxiv
• with S. Chatterjee, Persi Diaconis : Random graphs with a given degree sequence , Annals of Applied Probability, Volume 21, 2011, pp. 1400-1435
• with F. Krzakala, C. Moore, E. Mossel, J. Neeman, L. Zdeborová, P. Zhang: Spectral redemption: clustering sparse networks , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences USA, Vol. 110, 2013, pp. 20935-20940, Arxiv
• with Eyal Lubetzky: Cutoff for the Ising model on the lattice , Inventiones mathematicae, Volume 191, 2013, pp. 719–755, Arxiv
• with E. Lubetzky: Critical Ising on the square lattice mixes in polynomial time , Communications in Mathematical Physics, Volume 313, 2013, pp. 815-836, Arxiv
• with J. Ding, N. Sun: Proof of the satisfiability conjecture for large k , Proceedings of the 47th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), 2015, pp. 59-68. Arxiv
• with E. Mossel, J. Neeman: Reconstruction and estimation in the planted partition model , Probability Theory and Related Fields, Volume 162, 2015, pp. 431-461
• with E. Mossel, O. Tamuz: Strategic learning and the topology of social networks , Econometrica, Volume 83, 2015, pp. 1755–1794, Arxiv
• with E. Mossel, J. Neeman: A Proof Of The Block Model Threshold Conjecture , Combinatorica, Volume 38, 2018, pp. 655–708, Arxiv 2013
• with Riddhipratim Basu, Vladas Sidoravicius: Last Passage Percolation with a Defect Line and the Solution of the Slow Bond Problem , Arxiv 2014

Web links

• Homepage in Princeton

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Allan Sly, IMO
2. ↑ Allan Sly in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
3. ↑ Acknowledgment from the MacArthur Foundation
4. ↑ Loeve Prize for Sly , Inst.Math. Statistics 2019