2026 Distinguished Lecture Series by Martin Hairer
13 Jan 2026, by in News10 – 12 February 2026
We are delighted to welcome Martin Hairer (EPFL/Imperial College), who will deliver the next Heilbronn Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS) from 10 – 12 February 2026.
Registration is free but required. Please register using the registration form below:
Martin Hairer
Professor of Pure Mathematics at EPFL, Lausanne and Imperial College London.
Martin Hairer is a mathematician globally renowned for his breakthrough work at the intersection of analysis and probability.
He won the Fields Medal in 2014 for visionary work which introduced a radical new way of constructing solutions for certain nonlinear stochastic partial differential equations which had been intractable before, and which are of great importance in particular to physics. In 2020 he won the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.
Lecture 1: Yang-Mills and the Mass Gap (Colloquium Style)
Tuesday 10 February 2026 | 15:30 – 16:30
Venue: LG.02, Fry building, School of Mathematics, University of Bristol
We will give an introduction to the probabilistic formulation of the Yang-Mills millenium problem and discuss some of the reasons why it is so hard. We will then discuss some of the progress made in this direction over the past five years or so and some hurdles that still need to be overcome.
Lecture 2: On Renormalisation and Symmetries
Wednesday 11 February 2026 | 16:00 – 17:00
Venue: G.10, Fry building, School of Mathematics, University of Bristol
In this lecture, we will delve deeper into the notion of ‘renormalisation’. We will present a typical result from the theory of regularity structures showing how, despite of the presence of renormalisation, one can obtain surprisingly robust continuity statements for singular stochastic PDEs. We will then exploit these to show why theories admitting a “formal” symmetry (like gauge covariance for Yang-Mills) can often be renormalised in such a way that the resulting finite theory still admits that symmetry even though the counter terms arising from renormalisation could potentially break it.
Lecture 3: Spectral Gap for the Infinite-Volume $\Phi^4_3$ Measure at High Temperature
Thursday 12 February 2026 | 14.30 – 15.30
Venue: G.10, Fry building, School of Mathematics, University of Bristol
We consider the natural (Langevin) dynamic for the $\Phi^4_3$ measure in infinite volume as a toy model for the Yang-Mills dynamic. It is shown that, at high enough temperature, this dynamic is exponentially ergodic and obeys a “one force, one solution” principle. This provides a particularly strong form of uniqueness and stability for the corresponding invariant measure. Some consequences are rotation invariance and a “mass gap” for the $\Phi^4_3$ measure.
Organised in collaboration with the School of Mathematics, University of Bristol
For more information please email the Heilbronn events team at heilbronn-coordinator@bristol.ac.uk
Information on past and future Distinguished Lecture Series is available here
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