The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 124

102
Tom Salisbury
acre! But, from a long life in physics, he can testify
for the major role of organizations like the Fields
Institute.” Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (Nobel Prize,
Physics, 1991.)
The following Fields story was told to me by Wendelin
Werner. He and Greg Lawler were in an upstairs office
at Fields, as participants at a 1999 conference (that year’s
Seminar on Stochastic Processes), when they received an
e-mail from Oded Schramm sharing a construction of a new
conformally invariant random process, now called SLE. Those
who know this subject will recognize that this means there is
a Fields Institute chapter in the work that eventually led to
Wendelin’s 2006 Fields medal.
The infrastructure that supports thematic programs is also
used in other ways, since Fields is a natural venue for faculty
at multiple universities to come together to collaborate on
projects. For example, during my time at Fields, statisticians
from across Canada worked at developing the National
Program for Complex Data Structures (NPCDS), a precursor
to today’s Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI).
The range of mathematics and statistics conferences and
workshops organized through Fields is striking. Among the
most unusual I can remember are two musical concerts we
organized in the institute, whose audiences sat both in the
atrium and above it, looking down. One of these focused
on the mathematically constructed compositions of Iannis
Xenakis. The other featured music composed by Donald
Coxeter, including a string quartet in which Catherine Sulem
and Niky Kamran performed.
Mathematics Education
The Fields Mathematics Education forum brings together
mathematicians, teachers, and educators. In 2005 it helped