Our colleague and friend Philippe Di Francesco has just been appointed member of the French Académie des Sciences.
After entering the École Polytechnique in 1982 (ranked first) and being admitted to the Corps des Mines, he joined the Service de Physique Théorique (former name of the IPhT) as a permanent researcher in 1988.
His professional experience has been enriched by several stays in the United States, first as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, then as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and more recently at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His appointment to the Académie des Sciences marks the culmination of an outstanding scientific career in mathematical physics, in fields ranging from conformal field theories, integrable systems in statistical physics and random matrices in quantum gravity to, more recently, combinatorics in relation to random maps, tilings and cluster algebras. Co-author of a reference book on conformal field theories, he has contributed to a better understanding of the conformal limits of the Potts and critical loop models thanks to modular invariance, as well as to establishing numerous rigorous results on the intrinsic geometry of large random maps. His research also established a connection between problems of pure combinatorics and notions of discrete integrability, with a particular application to the arctic phenomenon in random tilings. We also owe him a large number of enumerative results in notoriously difficult problems such as that of meanders, as well as some remarkable conjectures, still open.
Tireless calculator, curious and interested in all aspects of physics and mathematics, always ready to get involved in new problems, Philippe is an exceptional researcher in terms of talent, enthusiasm and availability, making him a major asset to our laboratory.
Congratulations to our new Academician!