Greg Lawler

Gregory F. Lawler is the George Wells Beadle Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Chicago, where he has been a faculty member since 2006, initially as Professor from 2006 to 2013. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1976 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1979 under the supervision of Edward Nelson. Earlier in his career, Lawler served at Duke University from 1979 to 2001 in positions including Assistant Professor (1979–1985), Associate Professor (1985–1991), Professor (1991–2001), and A. Hollis Edens Professor of Mathematics (2001–2003), followed by a professorship at Cornell University from 2001 to 2006. His research centers on random walks and continuous analogues such as Brownian motion and diffusions, with a special emphasis on processes arising in statistical physics, including self-avoiding random walks, loop-erased random walks, uniform spanning trees, percolation, Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE), Gaussian free field (GFF), and loop measures in two dimensions. He has also investigated applications of probability to complex analysis.

Lawler has garnered major awards, including the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2019 shared with Jean-François Le Gall, the George Pólya Prize from SIAM in 2006, election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, fellowship in the American Mathematical Society in 2012, and the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship from 1986 to 1990. He delivered a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018 and an invited lecture in 2002. Among his key books are Intersections of Random Walks (Birkhäuser, 1991), Introduction to Stochastic Processes (Chapman & Hall, 1995; second edition, 2006), Lectures on Contemporary Probability (AMS, 1999, with L. Coyle), Conformally Invariant Processes in the Plane (AMS, 2005), Random Walk: A Modern Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2010, with V. Limic), Random Walk and the Heat Equation (AMS, 2010), and Random Explorations (AMS, 2022). Notable publications include "A self-avoiding random walk" (Duke Mathematical Journal, 1980) and papers on loop-erased random walks and SLE. Lawler has held significant editorial roles, such as editor-in-chief of the Annals of Probability (2006–2008), editor of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society (2009–2013), and co-founder and co-editor of the Electronic Journal of Probability (1995–1999).