Sylvia Serfaty is Silver Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Prior to this she has been Professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (currently Sorbonne Université) at the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions, and has held various appointments at the Courant Institute of NYU. She earned her BS and MS in Mathematics from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1995, and her Ph.D. from Université Paris Sud in 1999.

She works in calculus of variations, nonlinear partial differential equations, and mathematical physics. A large part of her work has focused on analyzing vortices in the Ginzburg-Landau model of superconductivity and on the statistical mechanics of systems of points with Coulomb-type repulsion.

She was the recipient of the European Mathematical Society prize in 2004, the Henri Poincaré prize in 2012 and the Mergier-Bourdeix Prize of the Académie des Sciences de Paris in 2013, and was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. She was also named a Simons Investigator in 2018 and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. 

Richard Kenyon is Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. He received his BA in 1986 from Rice University and Ph.D. from Princeton in 1990 under the supervision of William Thurston. He has held positions in CNRS at Grenoble, Lyon, and Orsay, and as full professor at UBC, Brown and Yale.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a recipient of the Simons Investigator award, the Loeve prize and the Rollo Davidson prize.

His research interests are in statistical mechanics, probability, combinatorics and geometry.