Nationality French Doctoral students Yimin Xiao Awards Fermat Prize, Loeve Prize Doctoral advisor Gustave Choquet Fields Mathematics | Alma mater Paris VI University Role Mathematician Institutions CNRS Name Michel Talagrand | |
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Known for Talagrand's concentration inequality Education Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University People also search for Michel Ledoux, Gustave Choquet, Sergio Albeverio Books The Generic Chaining, Upper and Lower Bounds f, Mean Field Models for Spin Glas, Pettis integral and meas, Mean Field Models for Spin Glas | ||
Notable awards Loeve Prize, Fermat Prize | ||
Michel Pierre Talagrand (born 15 February 1952) is a French mathematician. Docteur ès sciences since 1977, he has been, since 1985, Directeur de Recherches at CNRS and a member of the Functional Analysis Team of the Institut de Mathématique of Paris. Talagrand was elected as correspondent of the Académie des sciences of Paris on March 1997, and then as a full member on November 2004, in the Mathematics section.
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Talagrand studies mainly functional analysis and probability theory and their applications.
Scientific activity
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 kind 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 one of them, does have only small fluctuations. These inequalites helped to solve most classical problems in probability theory on Banach spaces, and have also transformed the abstract theory of stochastic processes. These inequalites 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). The recent works of Talagrand concern spin glasses mean fields models. His objective is to give a mathematical foundation to numerous remarkable works of physicists in this domain. Talagrand showed for instance recently the validity of the Parisi formula.