Olivier Bernardi  /  Home

Que sed - de saber cuanto! - Que hambre - de saber cuantas - estrellas tiene el cielo!                Pablo Neruda -- Odas elementales 

I am a Professor, and the current Chair of the Mathematics Department at Brandeis University.


Curriculum vitae.


Contact: 

Email: bernardi [at] brandeis.edu

Office: Goldsmith 301

Mailing address: Brandeis University, Department of Mathematics, MS 050.  

415 South Street, Waltham, MA 02453, USA. 


Short Bio:

I graduated from Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 2003, and completed my Ph.D. at Université Bordeaux in 2006 under the supervision of Mireille Bousquet-Melou. After a short postdoc at the Centre de Recerca Mathematica in Barcelona (supervised by Marc Noy and Dominic Welsh), I joined the Mathematics Department of Universite Paris-Saclay (Orsay) as a CNRS researcher in 2007. Two years later I took a leave from CNRS to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as Instructor of Applied Mathematics (2009-2012). I joined Brandeis University in 2012, becoming Full Professor of Mathematics in 2020, and Department Chair in 2021. 


Research interests:

My main research interests are in combinatorics and probability. I study (and solve!) problems coming from mathematical physics, probability, algebra and computer science. 

In my research hours, I often try to find new ways to encode some complex mathematical structures (often geometric objects) by simpler ones (lattice paths, trees, permutations). These encodings help reveal hidden patterns and structures in the objects of interest and can be used to solve mathematical questions about them.

One of my favorite topics is the combinatorics of maps (graphs embedded in surfaces). Maps are important mathematical structures which appear in a wide variety of contexts: graph theory, statistical mechanics, random surface theory (2D quantum gravity), random matrix theory, representation theory, and computer science. 


Selected publications: (see the link at the top for my complete publication list)