Professor of Mathematics Tom Hutchcroft has been awarded a 2024 European Mathematical Society (EMS) prize "for his revolutionary contributions to probability theory and geometric group theory, in particular to percolation theory on general graphs, using tools from geometry, operator theory, group theory and functional analysis."
The award will be given in person at a ceremony in Seville, Spain, on July 15, 2024. Every four years, the EMS awards up to 10 prizes to early career researchers "not older than 35 years at the time of nomination, of European nationality or working in Europe, in recognition of excellent contributions in mathematics," according to the society.
Hutchcroft, who is from England, specializes in percolation theory, which is the mathematical study of what happens when liquids flow through a porous medium, such as water percolating through ground coffee beans to make an espresso. He studies what happens during a critical phase transition in percolation, the point where an abrupt qualitive change in the system occurs. During this phase transition, interesting fractal patterns (self-similar patterns seen at different scales) emerge. "You only change one factor in the system a tiny bit, and then you get a big change," said Hutchcroft when explaining these phase transitions in a Caltech interview.
Hutchcroft is known in particular for his work exploring the behavior of percolation and other probabilistic processes in curved, non-Euclidean geometries. It is believed that additional phase transitions occur in these curved geometries that do not occur in ordinary, flat Euclidean space, and Hutchcroft has proved that this is so for several important cases. His work is noted for its interdisciplinary character, blurring the borders between probability theory and group theory, the latter of which is the abstract mathematical study of symmetry.
Hutchcroft earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Cambridge University in 2013 and his PhD in mathematics from the University of British Columbia, Canada, in 2017. He held internships at Microsoft Research Theory Group during his graduate studies and later completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Cambridge from 2017 to 2021. He joined the Caltech faculty in 2021.
Other Caltech-affiliated mathematicians who have received the EMS prize include Stanislav Smirnov (PhD '96) in 2004, former Caltech professor Alexei Borodin in 2008, and former Caltech postdoc Adrian Ioana in 2012.