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25/03/24 11:59 AM IST

Abel Prize 2024

In News
  • The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2024 to Michel Talagrand, who carried out his research career at the CNRS.
About prize
  • The Abel Prize is named after the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. The prize was instituted in 2002, to commemorate his 200-th birth anniversary.
  • The Fields Medal and the Abel Prize are the two important international prizes for mathematics.
  • While the Fields Medal honours brilliant work done by a mathematician below the age of forty years, the Abel Prize has no age limit and is more of a lifetime achievement award celebrating important contributions made to a field of mathematics.
  • The first Abel Prize, awarded in 2003, went to French mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre.
  • The only person of Indian origin to have won this prize is Srinivasa S.R. Varadhan. He is at the Courant Institute, New York University, and won it in 2007.
  • So far, the prize has gone to only one woman mathematician, Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck of University of Texas, U.S.A.
  • The prize consists of a citation and a prize money of 7.5 million Norwegian Kroner.
The Abel Prize is given for three specific areas of Talagrand's work:
  • Suprema of stochastic processes – A stochastic process produces a sequence of random values, and the "supremum" is the largest value to be expected from a collection of those values. If the height of waves crashing on a beach is a stochastic process, it is useful to know what the largest wave to hit the beach next year is likely to be
  • Concentration of measures – Counterintuitively, when a process depends on a range of different sources of randomness, instead of getting more complicated, it is possible for the different random factors to compensate for each other and produce more predictable results. Talagrand has given sharp quantitative estimates for this.
  • Spin glass – Leaving abstract probability theory behind, a "spin glass" is a special form of matter that atoms can arrange themselves in, much to the initial surprise of physicists. Talagrand used his knowledge of statistics and probability to prove limits on how spin glass matter can behave, and thereby completed the proof of Giorgio Parisi’s Nobel Prize winning work (2021).
Michel Talagrand
  • Michel Talagrand was born in 1952 in France, and he obtained his PhD in mathematics in 1977 from the University of Paris VI.
  • He spent some years at Ohio State University in the US. Recruited by the CNRS in 1974, he studied until he retired in 2017 functional analysis, then probability and its applications.
  • He was assigned to a laboratory, the Mathematics Institute of Jussieu-Paris Rive Gauche shared by the French National Center for Scientific Research, Sorbonne University and Université Paris Cité.
  • He is married and has two sons. Member of the French Academy of Sciences, this former research director has receved over ten prizes, including the Shaw Prize in 2019.
Source- The Hindu

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