The Introductory School is a one-week program of the ESI Thematic program on Statistical Mechanics and Combinatorics of Discrete Planar Structures from 14.-18. September 2026.

The Introductory school is co-organised by Nathanael Berestycki (University of Vienna), Michael Drmota (TU Wien), Ilse Fischer (University of Vienna), Mihyun Kang (TU Graz), Christian Krattenthaler (University of Vienna), Marcin Lis (TU Wien), Benedikt Stufler (TU Wien) and Fabio Toninelli (TU Wien).

The introductory school will feature courses on the dimer model, bijective combinatorics, as well as on the Fortuin-Kasteleyn percolation model in statistical mechanics. It will be primarily designed so that the talks are accessible to PhD students and postdocs, but also more senior researchers who may not necessarily be familiar with the background in one area.

Mini-courses

Ilse Fischer (University of Vienna) will give a mini-course on Alternating Sign Matrices and Plane Partitions.

Rick Kenyon (Yale University) will give a minicourse on Dimers and webs.

Ioan Manolescu (University of Fribourg) will give a mini-course on GFF convergence for the height function of the six-vertex model.

For the abstracts of each mini-course, please go to the Program section.

Partial support is acknowledged from the SFB F 1002  “Discrete random structures: enumeration and scaling limits” by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

The support of the following organizations is greatly acknowledged: