A Conversation with David J. Aldous

Abstract

. David John Aldous was born in Exeter U.K. on July 13, 1952. He received a B.A. and Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1973 and 1977, respectively from Cambridge. After spending two years as a research fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge, he joined the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1979 where he spent the rest of his academic career until retiring in 2018. He is known for seminal contributions on many topics within probability including weak convergence and tightness, exchangeability, Markov chain mixing times, Poisson clumping heuristic and limit theory for large discrete random structures including random trees, stochastic coagulation and fragmentation systems, models of complex networks and interacting particle systems on such structures. For his contributions to the field, he has received numerous honors and awards including the Rollo David-son prize in 1980, the inaugural Loeve prize in Probability in 1993, and the Brouwer medal in 2021, and being elected as an IMS fellow in 1985, Fellow of the Royal Society in 1994, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004, elected to the National Academy of Sciences (foreign associate) in 2010, ICM plenary speaker in 2010 and AMS fellow in 2012.