TUTE FELLOWS
New appointments are made annually to recognize those who have contributed in a significant
way to activities at the Fields Institute and within the Canadian mathematical community.
Professor James Mingo
James Mingo received his PhD from Dalhousie
University under the supervision of Peter Fillmore
in 1982. He was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at
Purdue University and UCLA and later an NSERC
University Research Fellow at MSRI and the University
of Toronto before becoming a Queen’s National
Scholar at Queen’s University in 1987. He has been at
Queen’s since then and Head of Department at the
Department of Mathematics and Statistics since 2016.
Professor Mingo’s early research was on K-theory
of C*-algebras. In recent years he has used
free probability to study various aspects of
random matrices, in particular their asymptotic
behaviour. In 2017 he published a book with
Roland Speicher in the Fields Institute Monograph
Series on free probability and random matrices
based on a graduate course taught at Fields.
His involvement with the Fields Institute has been
ongoing, both as a speaker and organizer for numerous
James Mingo
conferences and workshops. Most recently, he was
involved in the organization of a Focus Program on
Noncommutative Distributions in Free Probability
Theory, which ran throughout summer 2019.
Professor Mingo explains, “Random matrices are
matrices with random entries. The eigenvalue
distribution of random matrices are widely
used in statistics, physics, mathematical
finance, wireless communications, as
well as many areas of mathematics.
Free independence is a new kind of independence
that is especially useful for studying random
matrices. Free probability, while running in
parallel with classical probability, constantly
surprises us with new twists on the old theory.
As this is a very new subject there are many simple
questions that are just waiting to be investigated.”
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