24/01/2019

Gregory Lawler and Le Gall share the 2019 Wolf Prize

Gregory Lawler, da Universidade de Chicago

Mathematicians Gregory Lawler of the University of Chicago and Jean-François Le Gall of the University of Paris-Sud are the winners of the prestigious 2019 Wolf Prize, in recognition of their research in probability and stochastic fields.
Awarded annually by the Wolf Foundation since 1978, the prize honors outstanding researchers in the fields of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, physics, medicine, and the arts. Winners receive US$100,000, presented at the awards ceremony, which will take place in May in Jerusalem, Israel.

American Lawler is a professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the George Wells Beadle Distinguished Service. Frenchman Le Gall works at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay. According to the Wolf Foundation, the mathematicians' work "has become the springboard for many subsequent advances."
This is the second consecutive year that mathematics academics from the University of Chicago have been awarded the Wolf Prize. In 2018, Alexander Beilinson and Vladimir Drinfeld received the prize for their groundbreaking work in the field of algebraic geometry.
According to Lawler, a professor at the University of Chicago since 2006, the prize recognizes the advances in the field of probability over the past 40 years. These advances have made probability more accessible in matters requiring mathematical rigor.
Author and co-author of six books, Lawler is He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Mathematical Society, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics. In 2006, he received the George Pólya Prize from the Society for Applied and Industrial Mathematics.
One of the concepts Lawler studies is known as a "random walk," which describes how an object moves in a series of random steps in any direction. These "random walks" are useful in modeling the behavior of an atom in a gas cloud or the spread of an epidemic. The concept is applied in biology, meteorology, chemistry, and economics, among other fields.

Jean-François Le Gall. Crédito: Benoît Rajau/CNRS

Biographies

Born in 1955 in Alexandria, Virginia (USA), Lawler studied Mathematics at the University of Virginia. He completed his doctorate in 1979 at Princeton University and taught at Duke and Cornell Universities. He was editor-in-chief of the Annals of Probability (2006-2008), editor of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society (2009-2013), and co-founder of the Electronic Journal of Probability (1995). He was a speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Beijing (2002) and a plenary speaker at the ICM 2018 in Rio de Janeiro.
Jean-François Le Gall, born in 1959 in Morlaix, France, works in the field of probability theory, focusing on Brownian motion, Lévy processes, superprocesses, and their connections to partial differential equations. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie – Paris VI and has received the Rollo Davidson Prize (1986), the Loève Prize (1997), and the Fermat Prize (2005). He was also the supervisor of Werner Wendelin, Fields Medal winner in 2006.