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The 2010 André Aisenstadt Prize is awarded to Omer Angel of the University of British Columbia. Dr. Angel won a gold medal in the 1993 International Math Olympiad, and went on to obtain his Ph. D. from the Weizmann Institute in 2003 under the supervision of Itai Benjamini and Oded Schramm. After post-doctoral experiences at the Université Paris-Sud and UBC, and a faculty position at U. of Toronto, he joined the staff at the University of British Columbia in 2008. He works in probability theory, on percolation, random walks and random spatial processes of all sorts, with applications to other areas of mathematics, physics and even biology. He has many impressive results, of which two are:

In early work Angel, with Schramm, put the local study of random triangulations on firm ground by proving the existence of a limit object. Subsequently he showed how to sample such a uniform random triangulation, a tool which allowed him to determine the critical percolation probability, and establish the widely held belief (amongst physicists) that a random metric on a manifold has Hausdorff dimension 4.

In more recent work with Holroyd, Romik and Virag, they gave a very precise description of some of the statistics of a random sorting network, allowing them to make the remarkable conjecture that a typical short (random) path between objects on a lattice stays close to a geodesic (under the standard embedding).

The Prize will be awarded to Dr. Angel at a ceremony to be held March 11, 2010 at the CRM.