Dear Yuansi, dear Vice President in absentia, dear family and friends, ladies and gentlemen,
It is my pleasure to welcome you to Yuansi Chen's inaugural lecture and to
introduce him to you.
Yuansi was born in Ningbo, China, in 1990, where he also attended high school. Yuansi then took up the highly challgenging path of an international cooperation between France and China, which allowed him to join a classe preparatoire at the Lucee Hoche in Versailles. After succeeding in the first concours in China he also did so in the subsequent concours in France. He then studied applied mathematics at the Ecole polytechnique in Palaiseau.
Yuansi then continued his graduate studies at UC at Berkeley where he completed his PhD thesis supervised by Bin Yu with the well sounding title: "Fast MCMC algorithms, Stability and DeepTune".
Yuansi Chen works on high dimensional optimisation problems, where stochastic analysis, high dimensional geometry, functional inequalities, statistical learning and artificial intellegence algorithms meet. Its another instance of John Tukey's famous quote, which Yansi likes a lot, that the best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard. You can obtain a another lively impression on playing in backyards by reading an article in the Quanta Magazine entitled: "Statistics Postdoc tames decades old geometry problem" and subtitled "to the surprise of experts in the field, a postdoctoral statistician has solved one of the most important problems in high-dimensional convex geometry". Yuansi, then of course postdoc at ETH Zurich, managed to solve the Kannan-Lovasz-Simonovits conjecture, which implies a slicing conjecture formulated by fields medailist Jean Bourgain, who – second connection to ETH – was supervised by our former colleague Freddy Delbaen.
After his successful postdoctoral years at ETH Yuansi took an assistant
professorship at Duke University in 2021.
We are very happy that Yuansi Chen has then accepted our offer and joined the D-MATH at ETH Zurich as a Associate Professor in 2024. We are looking forward to his inaugural lecture.