Richard Kenyon

Richard Kenyon in Berkeley , 1994

Richard W. Kenyon (* 1964 ) is an American mathematician who deals with combinatorics and probability theory.

Kenyon studied mathematics and physics at Rice University ( Bachelor 1986) and received his doctorate in 1990 from Princeton University (as an IBM Graduate Fellow) with William Thurston ( Self-Similar Tilings ). He then worked as a postdoc at the 1990/1991 Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), as a scientist at the CNRS from 1991 to 1993 at the Institut Fourier in Grenoble and then until 1997 at the École normal supérieure de Lyon . In 1999 he completed his habilitation at the University of Paris-Süd in Orsay, where he was Director of Research at the CNRS until 2003. In 2003/04 he was visiting professor at Princeton University, from 2004 to 2007 professor at the University of British Columbia and from 2007 professor at Brown University .

Kenyon dealt, among other things, with combinatorial and stochastic tiling problems and applications in statistical mechanics. For example, he investigated the plane dimer problem (originally dimer denotes a polymer of two atoms, what is meant here is a special covering of graphene), which is associated with domino tiling, and for which he showed asymptotic conformal invariance in 2000.

In 2001 he received the Rollo Davidson Prize and in 2007 the Loève Prize . In 1999 he received the CNRS bronze medal. Furthermore, Kenyon was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.

Fonts

• Local statistics of lattice dimers, Annales Institut Henri Poincaré, Probabilités, Vol. 33, 1997, p. 591.
• Conformal invariance of domino tilings, Annals of Probability, Vol. 28, 2000, p. 759.
• Dimers, Tilings and Trees, 2003
• with Andrei Okounkov , Scott Sheffield: Dimers and amoebae, Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 163, 2006, p. 1019.
• Kenyon, Okounkov: What is a Dimer?, Notices AMS, vol. 52, 2005, no.3 (PDF file; 160 kB)

Web links

• Homepage at Brown University