Allan Murray Sly is an Australian mathematician and statistician specializing in probability theory. He is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018.

Sly was a member of the Australian team at the 1999 and 2000 International Mathematical Olympiads, earning an honourable mention and a silver medal respectively.^[1] He attended Radford College, where he was dux of the year in 2000.^[2] He then studied at Australian National University, winning the University Medal in 2004,^[3] earning a bachelor's degree, and in 2006 earning a M.Phil.^[4]

He completed his Ph.D. in 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, Spatial and Temporal Mixing of Gibbs Measures, was supervised by Elchanan Mossel.^[5]

After postdoctoral study at Microsoft Research, he joined the statistics faculty at Berkeley in 2011, and moved to Princeton University as a professor of mathematics in 2016.^[6][7]

Sly's work has included research on finding clusters in networks, the use of information percolation to analyze the "cutoff" phenomenon in which Markov chains exhibit a sharp transition to their stationary distribution, embeddings of random sequences, and phase transitions for random instances of the satisfiability problem.^[4]

Sly won a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2012 ^[8] and was awarded the Rollo Davidson Prize in 2013. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018 for "applying probability theory to resolve long-standing problems in statistical physics and computer science".^[4][7] He was the winner of the 2019 Loeve prize.^[9]

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