For his seminal contributions to both probability theory and mathematical physics, the University of Toronto's Jeremy Quastel has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
“It is wonderful to have this kind of international recognition,” says Quastel, a professor and chair of the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Department of Mathematics. “This is a very active field in probability and statistical physics where U of T is leading the world.”
The distinction recognizes Quastel’s research into the extent to which macroscopic and phenomenological laws of physics can be derived rigorously from fundamental microscopic laws. In particular, Quastel discovered — with former U of T postdoctoral fellows Daniel Remenik and Konstantin Matetski — the strong coupling fixed point of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class describing the large-scale fluctuations of many interface growth models.
“We are extremely proud that Professor Quastel has received this richly deserved honour,” says Melanie Woodin, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science. “His work is a wonderful example of the depth of research being conducted in the Faculty.”
Quastel was also a Sloan Fellow and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He received his PhD from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Science, NYU, after which he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, then a faculty member at University of California, Davis. He joined U of T in 1998.