The Mathematician Who Made Phase Transitions Predictable

Hugo Duminil-Copin became a leading probabilist by solving difficult problems about phase transitions, the abrupt changes between ordered and disordered states. After studying at the École Normale Supérieure, he completed his doctorate at the University of Geneva in 2012 under Stanislav Smirnov. His work on percolation, the Ising model and random-cluster systems established sharp thresholds and new universality results. This documentary follows his rapid rise to professorships at Geneva and IHES and the 2022 Fields.

Phase transitions appear when water freezes, magnets lose order or networks suddenly become connected. The mathematics behind these changes is difficult because countless local random interactions produce precise global behavior. Duminil-Copin developed methods that proved when transitions are sharp and clarified which features are universal. This documentary turns abstract probability into a story about matter, networks and collective behavior while showing why his results reshaped modern statistical physics.