Tom Hutchcroft, the Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Mathematics at Caltech, has been awarded the 2025 Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society. This accolade is presented annually to mathematicians operating in the United Kingdom, or those who have been educated there, who are early in their professional journey. Hutchcroft obtained his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Cambridge University in 2013.
Hutchcroft’s citation for the award indicates that he is recognized for “solving numerous essential problems across various domains of probability theory. He has demonstrated profound creativity and ingenuity, particularly regarding the connection between graph geometry (notably Cayley graphs of groups) and the behavior of probabilistic processes on these structures.”
Hutchcroft specializes in probability theory—more specifically, Bernoulli percolation theory, named after the 17th-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, who made substantial early contributions to the field. Bernoulli percolation theory explores the intricate mathematics involved when percolating systems, such as water filtering through ground espresso beans or diseases propagating within populations, display phase transitions. During these pivotal phases, fractal-like mathematical constructs arise.
Hutchcroft has addressed several significant challenges within this theory, some of which pertain to mathematical entities referred to as Cayley graphs—visual representations that help examine geometry in environments that are highly symmetric but may differ drastically from the conventional “flat” Euclidean geometry of daily experience. “Hutchcroft is undeniably the foremost authority in comprehending percolation on Cayley graphs in general,” according to the lengthy citation from the London Mathematical Society.
The award citation also highlights Hutchcroft’s “elegant papers on random walks,” which represent mathematical trajectories where one random step follows another in succession. “Among Hutchcroft’s remarkable contributions in this domain, he formulated several fundamental conjectures that had remained unresolved since the late 1990s.”
Upon completing his education at Cambridge, Hutchcroft obtained his PhD in mathematics from the University of British Columbia in Canada in 2017. He completed internships at Microsoft Research during his graduate studies and later pursued postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Cambridge from 2017 to 2021. He joined the faculty at Caltech in 2021.
In 2024, he was honored with the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, which includes a grant of $875,000 over five years to advance his research.