Alain-Sol Sznitman: farewell lecture

Laudation by Robert Weismantel, Head of Department:

Dear colleagues, dear Alain

Alain-Sol Sznitman has been a full professor at ETH since 1991. He was born in 1955 in Paris, studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris and received his doctoral degree in 1983. He continued as a postdoc, went to the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York for two years, and then returned to Paris. Two years later, he became an associate professor at the Courant Institute and was promoted to the rank of a full professor in 1990. After one year, he decided not to return to Paris but to go to Zurich, where he has stayed for all these years until now.

Alain is working in probability theory and stochastic processes with links to physics which are mainly connected to Alains work and interest in problems of random media. He has written about a hundred papers, books, and monographs that influence the field. Three of his most cited works are "Topics and propagation of chaos" from 1991, "Stochastic differential equations with reflecting boundary conditions" from 1984, and his book from 1998 about "Brownian motion obstacles and random media". These are only three, but they give you an impression about the scope of the work he has done. It is also of no surprise, that Alain received many distinctions and awards, among them are the Rollo Davidson Prize in 1991, the Sloan Research Fellowship from 1989, and the Loève Prize in 1999. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin in 1998 and is currently serving as a member of several prestigious science academies.

Let me now briefly make a few comments on a personal level. What can I say about Alain? I see him as the man with a smile in his face. I have never ever seen him in a bad mood. Alain is extremely open-minded, he's attending – to the best of my knowledge – every seminar, talk and conference that you can imagine. I remember last year when we met at the German math conference in Berlin, I was surprised  that he attended all the lectures, even though some of them were parallel. I don't know, how he did the selection process, but it certainly shows that Alain is a scholar and that he has a really wide and broad interest in all kinds of topics. Last but not least, I can say that I am one of the happy people that are still in closer contact with Alain, because we are on the board for the Cluster of Excellence Math+ in Berlin and this job makes much more fun as long as Alain is around.

Thank you very much for all you have done for ETH and the Department. You have been on many committees, you have been a FIM director, but most importantly: thank you for being such a nice and convincing personality.

Alain, the stage is yours!