Allan Sly (2000) – Macarthur Fellow 2018

Allan Sly graduated as dux of his year in 2000 and is now working as a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Princeton.  Last week he was awarded the prestigious Macarthur Fellowship for applying probability theory to resolve long-standing problems in statistical physics and computer science.  It seems he has come a long way from regarding probability as the most boring area of math in his time at Radford!

According to the Macarthur Foundation, Allan is making fundamental progress on difficult problems that are of central interest to mathematics and have important applications in many other fields.

If you are a mathematics whiz, you can read more about it here.  Alternatively you can listen to Allan try and explain it much better than we ever could in the video below (including using a dinner party analogy).