Prize Recipient

David C. Brydges
University of British Columbia

"For achievements in the fields of constructive quantum field theory and rigorous statistical mechanics, especially the introduction of new techniques including random walk representations in spin systems, the lace expansion, and mathematically rigorous implementations of the renormalization group."

David C. Brydges received his BA in Physics from Cambridge University in 1970 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1976. His thesis advisor was Paul Federbush and his postdoctoral work was with James Glimm at Rockefeller University. He became a Commonwealth Professor at the University of Virginia and later Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has been professor emeritus since 2014. From 2003 to 2005, he was president of the International Association of Mathematical Physics. In 2007 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2010 he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad. His best known work was with other authors. It includes: a random walk representation that led to many results in probability, statistical mechanics and quantum field theory; the Lace expansion for the end-to-end distance of self-repelling walk in dimension five or more; exponential decay of correlations in Coulomb systems (Debye screening); a Tree Graph Identity to prove convergence of expansions in statistical mechanics; the isomorphism of hard spheres in dimension $d$ with branched polymers in dimension $d+2$ (a rigorous instance of Parisi-Sourlas dimensional reduction); verification of Wightman axioms for the Abelian Higgs quantum field theory in two dimensions.