Hugo Duminil-Copin

Hugo Duminil-Copin was born on August 26, 1985, in Châtenay-Malabry, France. His mother was a dancer before becoming a primary school teacher, and his father was a sports teacher.⁠[1][2][3]

In his youth he also pursued activities such as music and sport, and nothing in his middle and high school years suggested he would later become a professional mathematician.⁠[3]

He spent two years in preparatory classes at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He struggled there at first, then worked hard and finished the year as the top student in mathematics.⁠[4][3]

In 2005 he entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he passed the agrégation in mathematics, and he earned a master’s degree in probability and statistics from Université Paris-Sud (now Université Paris-Saclay).⁠[2][5]

He recalled that he had always balanced “two loves,” mathematics and physics; he chose to study mathematics and then discovered statistical physics.⁠[6]

In 2008 he moved to the University of Geneva for his doctorate under Stanislav Smirnov and obtained his PhD in mathematics in 2011.⁠[2][7]

From 2011 to 2012 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva.⁠[7]

In 2012 he and Smirnov proved that the connective constant of self-avoiding walks on the hexagonal (honeycomb) lattice equals √(2+√2); the same year he and Vincent Beffara proved that the self-dual point of the two-dimensional random-cluster model is critical for q ≥ 1, settling the critical point of the q-state Potts model on the square lattice.⁠[8]

In 2012 he shared the Rollo Davidson Prize with Beffara and received the Vacheron Constantin Prize.⁠[1]

He became an assistant professor at the University of Geneva in 2013 and a professor there from 2014; in 2013 he received the Oberwolfach Prize.⁠[4]

In 2015 he, Michael Aizenman and Vladas Sidoravicius used the random-current representation to prove the continuity of the spontaneous magnetization of the three-dimensional Ising model; that year he also received the International Association of Mathematical Physics (IAMP) Early Career Award and gave the Cours Peccot at the Collège de France.⁠[8][7]

From September 2016 he also served as a permanent professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), and he is a member of the Laboratoire Alexander Grothendieck, a joint CNRS–IHES research unit.⁠[5][9]

In 2016 he received the European Mathematical Society Prize; in 2017 he received the Breakthrough Foundation’s New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, the French Academy of Sciences’ Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand and the Loève Prize, and that year he obtained a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant hosted by the University of Geneva.⁠[4][10]

In 2018 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro.⁠[11]

In 2019 he was elected to the Academia Europaea and received the Dobrushin Prize; that year he, Aran Raoufi and Vincent Tassion used decision trees to prove exponential decay in the subcritical phase and the sharpness of the phase transition for random-cluster and Potts models.⁠[4][8]

In 2021 he and Aizenman proved the “marginal triviality” of the scaling limits of critical four-dimensional Ising and φ⁴ lattice models, meaning they are Gaussian as Euclidean field theories.⁠[8]

On July 5, 2022, the International Mathematical Union awarded him the Fields Medal “for solving longstanding problems in the probabilistic theory of phase transitions in statistical physics,” especially in dimensions three and four.⁠[12][1]

His research belongs to the mathematical branch of statistical physics, using probability theory to study critical behaviour in models such as the Ising model, the Potts model, self-avoiding walks and percolation, and developing a theory of dependent percolation; that year he gave the Fields Medal lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians.⁠[1][7]

In 2023 he received two Frontiers of Science Awards. In 2024 he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences, and became a member of the French Presidential Council for Science and of the scientific council of the Fondation Blaise Pascal.⁠[7]

From 2024 he co-founded and co-directs G.EM, the University of Geneva’s science outreach structure; since 2022 he has given more than 150 public lectures.⁠[7]

On August 30, 2026, he published the essay “Care for a little more AI?” on the website Proofs and Prompts, calling AI’s progress in mathematics “spectacular” but worrying that AI-generated solutions to famous problems could erode the slow, shared process through which mathematical understanding develops; he wrote that such solutions “nuke the mathematical landscape, making it increasingly difficult to inhabit after each blast.”⁠[13]

In it he discussed the θ(pc) = 0 conjecture in percolation theory, saying it had “inhabited my mathematical dreams,” and stated that he had chosen not to rely on AI to replace his creative process. He recalled that the conjecture led him to Vincent Tassion, his main coauthor in percolation, and to his collaboration with Aizenman.⁠[13]

A few days later, a Lean-verified, Claude-generated proof of the conjecture in dimensions three to 10 appeared on GitHub, posted by AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry staff member Justin Leder; Anthropic had not formally announced it at the time. He had worked for years to prove the conjecture.⁠[14]

On September 11, 2026, 25 Fields medalists published the declaration “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,” arguing that the goals of AI companies and the mathematical community are severely misaligned; he was listed as “Fields Medal 2022” and was one of its authors. More than 7,400 researchers endorsed it within days.⁠[15][14]

On Tuesday, October 6, 2026, OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry announced that an unnamed internal model had solved 377 open mathematical questions, with the results spread across 722 papers uploaded to GitHub; OpenAI said about half had been formally verified in Lean.⁠[14]

On October 8 he gave the online talk “A Serious AI Alignment Flaw in Mathematics, 28 Days Later” in the Société Mathématique de France’s MIAM seminar “Math & AI at Noon.”⁠[16]

He said that he cried on the Tuesday night of OpenAI’s release: “Mardi, dans la nuit, j’ai pleuré et cela a réveillé ma fille” (On Tuesday night I cried, and it woke my daughter). He said the manuscripts OpenAI posted covered 16 open questions that interested him, and stated: “Ils ont annihilé mon domaine de recherche” (They annihilated my field of research).⁠[17][18]

He showed an AI-generated slide of a rabbit crushed by several trucks and said: “Ils ont voulu prouver qu’ils pouvaient nous massacrer” (They wanted to prove they could massacre us); in the question session he spoke “d’un démantèlement de notre activité” (of a dismantling of our activity).⁠[17][18]

From October 13 to 16, 2026, the Fields Institute in Toronto held the “2026 Fields Medal Symposium” devoted to him, with a public opening at Alliance Française Toronto on October 13; its scientific committee included Vincent Tassion and Wendelin Werner, among others.⁠[19]

Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques: Official website: https://www.ihes.fr/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Université de Genève: Official website: https://www.unige.ch/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]