I received today the terrible news that Oded Schramm, the outstanding probabilist, died two days ago in a hiking accident.
Oded was best known for his rigorous proofs of results for which heuristic arguments existed via statistical physics methods. The theory he developed with Gregory Lawler and Wendelin Werner has been spectacularly successful and it was recognized by many awards, most notably Werner’s Fields Medal.
Important problems in computer science, especially the existence of a satisfiability threshold in random 3SAT, have non-rigorous solutions via statistical physics methods, of a type that is not amenable to the Lawler-Schramm-Werner rigorous approach. The search for rigorous methods will have to continue without the leading figure of the field.
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
September 3, 2008 at 5:24 pm
aravind
I am very sorry to hear this — I saw him at MSR just a few weeks ago. Since I don’t know his family personally, I make use of this forum to wish them the best, and for strength to get through this.
aravind
September 4, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Oded « Combinatorics and more
[...] of Oded works concerning two dimensional stochastic processes and SLE. Luca Trevisan also devoted a post to Oded and mentioned connections of his work with computer science. Yuval Peres mentioned Oded [...]
September 4, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Top Posts « WordPress.com
[...] Oded Schramm I received today the terrible news that Oded Schramm, the outstanding probabilist, died two days ago in a hiking [...] [...]
September 5, 2008 at 7:07 am
Christian Mercat
Really sad news. I met Oded in Rehovot and admired him very much. He had plenty still to give us, I feel robbed somehow. Too bad.