Yilin Wang: inaugural lecture
On 25 November, Yilin Wang gave her inaugural lecture entitled: "Geometry of Surfaces through the lens of Probability". She has been Associate Professor of Mathematics in the Department since 1 July 2025.
Dear Yilin, dear Stefano Brusoni, Vice Rector for Continuing Education, dear family and friends, ladies and gentlemen
It is my pleasure to welcome you to Yilin Wang's inaugural lecture and to introduce her to you. Yilin was born in Shanghai, China, in 1991, where she also attended a foreign-language high school. Yilin then took the challenge – similar to her colleague Yuansi Chen – to try a french pre-concours. She did not do particularly well in mathematics, as she told me, but she impressed the French with her French, which is always seductive for them. She was finally offered a place in a classe préparatoires at Lycée du Parc in Lyon.
After studying at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Yilin continued her doctoral studies at ETH Zurich, supervised by Fields medalist Wendelin Werner. In 2019, she graduated with a dissertation entitled 'On the Lowner energy of simple planar curves'. This thesis also led to a single-authored paper of 49 pages on 'Equivalentdescriptions of the Loewner energy', which, remarkably, was published 2019 in Inventiones Mathematicae, one of the best journals of our field.
Her field of research is located in the area of Kiyoshi Ito's beautiful dream: doing geometry by means of stochastic analysis, i.e. investigating smooth geometric objects by joyfully exploring almost surely rough trajectories on them. As she writes herself: 'I spend most of my time playing with Loewner energy, Schramm-Loewner evolutions, the Gaussian free field, Weil-Petersson Teichmueller spaces, Brownian loop measures, and so on'. Some of these connections were actually discovered by her.
Yilin has already received many awards and grants: the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize in 2022 for her innovative and far-reaching work on the Loewner energy of planar curves; an ERC grant 'RaConTeich' in 2023; and the Salem Prize of the IAS for developing novel and deep connections between complex analysis, probability and mathematical physics.
Yilin spent three years as a C. L. E. Moore Instructor at MIT, including some time in Berkeley. From 2022 to 2024, she was a junior professor at IHES in Paris. We are very happy that Yilin Wang has accepted our offer and joined the faculty of D-MATH at ETH Zurich as Associate Professor in summer 2025. We are now looking forward to her inaugural lecture.