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Oded Schramm

Oded Schramm was an Israeli-American mathematician known for inventing the Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE) and for work joining conformal field theory and probability theory.

1961 to 2008Inventing the Schramm-Loewner evolutionScaling limits of discrete modelsCircle packing and discrete conformal geometry

Born: 10 December 1961, Jerusalem
Died: 1 September 2008, Washington
Occupation: mathematician
Education: Princeton University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Oded Schramm was born in 1961 in Jerusalem

Schramm was born in Jerusalem in 1961. His father, Michael Schramm, was a professor of biochemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science at the Hebrew University in 1986 and a master's degree in 1987, supervised by Gil Kalai. He completed his PhD at Princeton University in 1990 under William Thurston.

After two years at the University of California, San Diego, he held a permanent position at the Weizmann Institute from 1992 to 1999. In 1999 he joined the Theory Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, and stayed there for the rest of his life.

His research studied links between discrete models and their continuous scaling limits. With Gregory Lawler and Wendelin Werner he developed SLE, which allowed proofs about models such as percolation and self-avoiding random walk. He also worked on circle packing, percolation, spanning trees, noise sensitivity and random permutations.

He and his wife had two children, Tselil and Pele. On September 1, 2008, he died in a fall while climbing Guye Peak in Washington.