Vadim Gorin is a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a member of the Institute for Information Transmission Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a leading researcher in the area of integrable probability, and has been awarded several prizes, including the Sloan Research Fellowship and the Prize of the Moscow Mathematical Society.
'The lectures provide connections between random tilings and many areas in mathematics and theoretical physics, and include an exhaustive reference list. Mathematicians and others interested in the hows and whys of this intriguing area would be well-served by consulting this text.' Thomas Polaski, Mathematical Reviews/MathSciNet