Allan Murray Sly is an Australian mathematician and statistician specializing in

probability theory Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set ...

. He is a professor of mathematics at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

and was awarded a

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

in 2018.

Education and career

Sly was a member of the Australian team at the 1999 and 2000

International Mathematical Olympiad The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. The first IMO was held in Romania in 1959. It has since been held annually, except i ...

s, earning an honourable mention and a silver medal respectively. He attended

Radford College Radford College is an independent school, Anglican, coeducational day school, located in Bruce, Australian Capital Territory, Australia. Founded in 1984, the college is named after Bishop Lewis Bostock Radford. It has a non-selective enrolm ...

, where he was ''

dux ''Dux'' (; plural: ''ducēs'') is Latin for "leader" (from the noun ''dux, ducis'', "leader, general") and later for duke and its variant forms (doge, duce, etc.). During the Roman Republic and for the first centuries of the Roman Empire, '' ...

'' of the year in 2000. He then studied at

Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies an ...

, winning the University Medal in 2004, earning a bachelor's degree, and in 2006 earning a M.Phil. He completed his Ph.D. in 2009 at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. His dissertation, ''Spatial and Temporal Mixing of Gibbs Measures'', was supervised by Elchanan Mossel. After postdoctoral study at Microsoft Research, he joined the statistics faculty at Berkeley in 2011, and moved to Princeton University as a professor of mathematics in 2016.

Contributions

Sly's work has included research on finding clusters in networks, the use of information percolation to analyze the "cutoff" phenomenon in which Markov chains exhibit a sharp transition to their

stationary distribution Stationary distribution may refer to: * A special distribution for a Markov chain such that if the chain starts with its stationary distribution, the marginal distribution of all states at any time will always be the stationary distribution. Assum ...

, embeddings of random sequences, and phase transitions for random instances of the

satisfiability problem In mathematical logic, a formula is ''satisfiable'' if it is true under some assignment of values to its variables. For example, the formula x+3=y is satisfiable because it is true when x=3 and y=6, while the formula x+1=x is not satisfiable over ...

Recognition

Sly won a

Sloan Research Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

in 2012. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018 for "applying probability theory to resolve long-standing problems in statistical physics and computer science". He is the winner of the 2019 Loeve prize.

References

External links

Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sly, Allan Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Australian mathematicians Australian statisticians 21st-century American mathematicians American statisticians Probability theorists Australian National University alumni UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty Princeton University faculty Sloan Research Fellows MacArthur Fellows International Mathematical Olympiad participants People educated at Radford College