Michel Talagrand

Michel Talagrand
Born	February 1952 (age 59)
Nationality	France
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	CNRS
Alma mater	Paris VI University
Doctoral advisor	Gustave Choquet
Doctoral students	Yimin Xiao
Known for	Talagrand's concentration inequality
Notable awards	Loève Prize (1995) Fermat Prize (1997)

Michel Pierre Talagrand (born 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.

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 most well known prediction: the Parisi formula.

Awards

• Peccot-Vimont Prize of the French Collège de France (1980)
• Servant Prize of the French Académie des sciences (1985)
• Invited Speaker to the International Congress of Mathematicians (Kyoto 1990)
• Loève Prize in Probability (1995)
• Fermat Prize for mathematical research (1997)
• Corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences (1997)
• Plenary Speaker to the International Congress of Mathematicians (Berlin 1998)
• Member of the French Academy of Sciences (2004)
• Chevalier of the Order of the Legion of Honor (2011)

Selected publications

• Espaces de Banach faiblement K-analytiques, Annals of Math. 110 (1979) 407-438
• Regularity of Gaussian processes, Acta Math. 159 (1987) 99-149
• Some distributions that allow perfect packing, (avec W. Rhee), J. of A.C.M. 35 (1988) 564-578
• The Three Space Problem for L1, J. of Amer. Math. Soc. 3 (1989) 9-30
• Type, infratype and the Elton-Pajor theorem Invent. Math. 107 (1992 )41-59
• Sharper bounds for Gaussian and empirical processes, Ann. Probab. 22 (1994) 28-76
• Matching theorems and discrepancy computations using majorizing measures, J. Amer. Math. Soc. 7 (1994) 455-537
• Concentration of measure and isoperimetric inequalities in product spaces, Publications I.H.E.S. 81 (1995) 73-205
• Sections of smooth convex bodies via majorizing measures, Acta. Math 175 (1995) 273-306
• The Parisi Formula, Annals of Math (2005)

Reference Books

• M. Talagrand, Pettis Integral and Measure Theory, Memoirs of the AMS no. 307 (1984)
• M. Ledoux & M. Talagrand, Probability in Banach Spaces, Springer-Verlag (1991)
• M. Talagrand, Spin glasses, a Challenge for Mathematicians, Springer-Verlag (2003)
• M. Talagrand, The Generic Chaining, Springer-Verlag (2005)

See also

• Talagrand's concentration inequality

External links

• The personal web page of Michel Talagrand
• Michel Talagrand at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

Persondata
Name	Talagrand, Michel Pierre
Alternative names
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Date of birth	1952
Place of birth
Date of death
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