Mathematical Conversations

A great achievement of physics in the second half of the twentieth century has been the prediction of conformal symmetry of the scaling limit of critical statistical physics systems. Around the turn of the millenium, the mathematical understanding of this fact has progressed tremendously in two dimensions with the introduction of the Schramm-Loewner Evolution and the proofs of conformal invariance of the Ising model and dimers. Nevertheless, the understanding is still restricted to very specific models. In this talk, we will gently introduce the notion of conformal invariance of lattice systems by taking the example of percolation models. We will also explain some recent and partial progress in the direction of proving conformal invariance for a large class of such models.