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The 2024 Abel Prize—the mathematics world’s Nobel Prize equivalent—has been awarded to Michel Talagrand for his advances in describing and predicting the universe’s randomness. Talagrand’s path into mathematics was marked with personal struggle and resilience, and his recognition came as a shock to him.
“There was a total blank in my mind for at least four seconds,” Talagrand tells Nature News’ Davide Castelvecchi, describing when he heard the news of his award. “If I had been told an alien ship had landed in front of the White House, I would not have been more surprised.”
Talagrand’s work focuses on stochastic systems, which model random variables within a given time and space. Examples include the height of a flowing river, stock prices, a hospital’s patient count, the movement of gas molecules, and even a stumbling drunkard’s swerving path. Over years of work, he came to make sense of such systems, using mathematical formulas known as inequalities, to better characterize the limits of their variability.
Where to safely build a house along a rushing waterway, or how to anticipate the growth of a bacterial population, for example, are problems with solutions that may be closely predicted using Talagrand’s methods. The water level in a river may be random, but the mathematician’s work can discern its likely maximum level, which would advise where to construct buildings to avoid flooding, writes the New York Times’ Kenneth Chang.
Essentially, his inequalities, which convert complex systems into geometrical terms, create precise estimates. They offer new tools for study and applications in other fields, including physics, chemistry, communications, and ecology.
“There are papers posted maybe on a daily basis where the punchline is ‘now we use Talagrand’s inequalities,’” Assaf Naor, a mathematician at Princeton University, tells Nature News.
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Michel Talagrand is the 27th recipient of the Abel Prize, which was first awarded in 2003. Peter Badge / Typos1 / Abel Prize 2024
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