Baxter 2015: Exactly Solved Models & Beyond

“Baxter 2015: Exactly Solved Models & Beyond” is a meeting organised in honour of Rodney Baxter’s 75th birthday. The conference will highlight Professor Baxter’s pioneering contributions to exactly solved models in statistical mechanics which have inspired crucial developments in key areas of theoretical physics and mathematics.

Invited Speakers

Professor George Andrews is a number theorist who contributed significantly to our understanding of the role played by q-series, such as the Rogers-Ramanujan identities, in exactly solvable lattice models. He also is one of the co-discoverers of the famous Andrews-Baxter-Forrester models.  Andrews is a past President of the American Mathematical Society (2007-2009) and member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Professor Ludwig Faddeev pioneered the quantum inverse scattering method in integrable systems, which played an important part in the development of quantum groups by Drinfeld and Jimbo. He is famous for many other contributions to mathematics and physics and as leader of the “Leningrad School”. Faddeev is a past president of the International Mathematics Union (1986-1990), member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences (USA), French Academy of Sciences and Royal Society and recipient of the Dannie Heineman Prize, Dirac Prize, Max Planck Medal, Poincaré Prize, Shaw Prize and numerous other awards. 

Professor Michio Jimbo discovered what are now known as quantum groups through his study of the Yang-Baxter equations. For this work he was awarded the Japan Academy Prize, the Wigner medal and the Dannie Heineman Prize. 

Professor Barry McCoy is one of the pioneers in the field of exactly solvable lattice models, well-known for his work on the celebrated Ising model, and has written one of the key monographs in the field: “The two dimensional Ising model”. McCoy was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for his many contributions to mathematical physics. 

Professor Alexander Polyakov, together with Belavin and Zamolodchikov, is the discoverer of two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) in the 1980s and the realisation that two-dimensional critical systems can be described by CFTs. Polyakov is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Science (USA) and has been awarded the Onsager Prize, Klein Medal, Lorentz Medal, Dannie Heineman Prize and Dirac Medal. 

Professor Stanislav Smirnov received the 2010 Fields Medal for proving that critical percolation in conformally invariant. He recently solved the longstanding open problem in integrable systems concerning the connective constant of self-avoiding walks. Apart from the Fields medal, Smirnov is the recipient of the Salem Prize and Prize of the European Mathematical Society. 

Professor Alexander Zamolodchikov is one of the co-discoverers of two-dimensional conformal field theory. He is also famous for the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equations describing correlation functions in CFT. For his work Zamolodchikov received the Dannie Heineman Prize and Onsager Prize.