Maurice Duits

Maurice Duits orginally came to KTH as a postdoc in 2011, and was promoted to full professor in November 2021. His research is largely inspired by the fact that many large systems consisting of random small parts behave in predictable ways.

For example, how is it that many objects around us appear to be static and not chaotic, but they are all built out of atoms that behave quite wildly individually? Moreover, how is it that the randomness that remains in such systems often follows laws that are universal, and the same law can be found in seemingly very different models?

For mathematicians the challenge is to build a framework to study the mechanisms behind such phenomena, by studying large classes of models that are simple enough so that they can be analysed in detail. One of Maurice favourite scientific research fields is the random tiling of planar domains. In such models, one tiles a large two-dimensional region randomly by a given number of small shapes. There are many possible ways to tile, but the vast majority seem to have roughly the same shape with smaller fluctuations.

The shape depends heavily on the region that is tiled, but the fluctuations are described by universal laws. Maurice and his team are currently developing new mathematical tools to study such phenomena.