Allan Sly (mathematician)
{{Short description|Australian mathematician and statistician}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=February 2025}}
Allan Murray Sly is an Australian mathematician and statistician specializing in probability theory. He is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018.
Education and career
Sly was a member of the Australian team at the 1999 and 2000 International Mathematical Olympiads, earning an honourable mention and a silver medal respectively.{{r|imo}} He attended Radford College, where he was dux of the year in 2000.{{r|rad}} He then studied at Australian National University, winning the University Medal in 2004,{{r|anumed}} earning a bachelor's degree, and in 2006 earning a M.Phil.{{r|mac}}
He completed his Ph.D. in 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, Spatial and Temporal Mixing of Gibbs Measures, was supervised by Elchanan Mossel.{{r|mg}}
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.{{r|berkmac|prinmac}}
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, embeddings of random sequences, and phase transitions for random instances of the satisfiability problem.{{r|mac}}
Recognition
Sly won a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2012 {{r|sloan}} and was awarded the Rollo Davidson Prize in 2013. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018 for "applying probability theory to resolve long-standing problems in statistical physics and computer science".{{r|mac|prinmac}} He was the winner of the 2019 Loeve prize.{{r|loeve}}
References
{{reflist|refs=
{{citation|url=http://www.anu.edu.au/files/prize/university-medal-prev.pdf|title=University Medallists from 1970 and winners of the University Prize 1963–1979|publisher=Australian National University|access-date=2018-12-02|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180328220244/http://www.anu.edu.au/files/prize/university-medal-prev.pdf|archive-date=2018-03-28|url-status=dead}}
{{citation|url=https://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=5724|title=Allan Sly|publisher=International Mathematical Olympiad|access-date=2018-12-02}}
{{citation|url=https://imstat.org/2019/09/02/allan-sly-awarded-loeve-prize/|title=Allan Sly awarded Loève Prize|publisher=Institute of Mathematical Statistics|date=2 September 2019|access-date=29 March 2025}}
}}
External links
- [https://web.math.princeton.edu/~asly/ Home page]
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sly, Allan}}
Category:Year of birth missing (living people)
Category:Australian mathematicians
Category:Australian statisticians
Category:21st-century American mathematicians
Category:American statisticians
Category:Probability theorists
Category:Australian National University alumni
Category:UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni
Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty
Category:Princeton University faculty
Category:Sloan Research Fellows