Michel Pierre Talagrand (born 15 February 1952) is a French mathematician. Doctor of Science since 1977, he has been, since 1985, Directeur de Recherches at CNRS and a member of the Functional Analysis Team of the Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris. Talagrand was also a faculty member at The Ohio State University for more than fifteen years. Talagrand was elected as correspondent of the Académie des sciences of Paris in March 1997, and then as a full member in November 2004, in the Mathematics section. In 2024, Talagrand received the Abel Prize. Talagrand studies mainly functional analysis and probability theory and their applications.

Career

Talagrand has been interested in probability with minimal structure. He has obtained a complete characterization of bounded Gaussian processes in very general settings, and also new methods to bound stochastic processes. He discovered new aspects of the isoperimetric and concentration of measure phenomena for product spaces, by obtaining inequalities which make use of new kinds of distances between a point and a subset of a product space. These inequalities show in great generality that a random quantity which depends on many independent variables, without depending too much on any one of them, has only small fluctuations. These inequalities helped to solve several classical problems in probability theory on Banach spaces, and have also transformed the abstract theory of stochastic processes. These inequalities have been successfully used in many applications involving stochastic quantities, like for instance in statistical mechanics (disordered systems), theoretical computer science, random matrices, and statistics (empirical processes). Talagrand commented in the introduction to his two volume monograph on mean field models of spin glasses: "More generally theoretical physicists have discovered wonderful new areas of mathematics, which they have explored by their methods. This book is an attempt to correct this anomaly by exploring these areas using mathematical methods, and an attempt to bring these marvelous questions to the attention of the mathematical community." In particular, the monograph offers an exposition of Talagrand's proof of the validity of the Parisi formula. Michel Talagrand was awarded the Abel Prize from The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for 2024 for his work in ‘Suprema of stochastic processes’, ‘Concentration of measures’ and ‘Spin glass’.

Personal life

He is married to Wansoo Rhee, a now retired professor of management science at The Ohio State University, whom he met on his first ever trip to the USA. They have two sons.

Awards

Selected publications

Reference Books