Mathematician Jeremy Quastel, Professor at the University of Toronto, awarded the 2024 Paul Lévy Prize in Probability Theory

Jeremy Quastel, Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, was awarded the Paul Lévy Prize during the 9th European Congress of Mathematics, being held in Seville from July 15 to 19. Created jointly by the European Mathematical Society, École Polytechnique, the Fondation de l'École Polytechnique and Paul Lévy’s family, with the support of BNP Paribas, this new prize is designed to reward outstanding contributions in the field of probability theory and its applications.

Chaired by Wendelin Werner, winner of the Fields Medal in 2006, and made up of eminent mathematicians, the Paul Lévy Prize Selection Committee has chosen to honour Jeremy Quastel.

A specialist in probability theory, stochastic processes and partial differential equations, Jeremy Quastel has been at the University of Toronto since 1998, and chaired its Department of Mathematics from 2017 to 2021. A native of Canada, he studied at McGill University, then the Courant Institute (NYU) where he completed his PhD in 1990 under the direction of S.R.S. Varadhan. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, then was a faculty at UCDavis until he returned to Canada in 1998. 

His research is on the large-scale behaviour of interacting particle systems and stochastic partial differential equations, recently concentrating on the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class, where he and collaborators discovered the first exact solutions of the KPZ equation, the polymer endpoint distribution, and, more recently the general solution of the model TASEP, and through it the fixed point of the universality class.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2016) and of the Royal Society (2021), Jeremy Quastel won the CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize (2018) and the Jeffery-Williams Prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society (2019).

"I am tremendously honoured to receive the Paul Lévy Prize, a prize named after a hero to probabilists! KPZ has seen an explosion of results, due to its remarkable depth both from a mathematical and physical point of view. And the KPZ fixed point is an unexpected gift. It is such a pleasure to see incredibly talented young people joining this field and look forward to what new surprises they will find," says Jeremy Quastel.
 

A prize created in honour of French mathematician Paul Lévy

A great French mathematician and professor at École polytechnique from 1920 to 1959, Paul Lévy largely shaped modern probability theory, introducing fundamental concepts such as local time, stable distributions and characteristic functions. To honour his memory, the European Mathematical Society, École polytechnique, the Fondation de l'École polytechnique and Paul Lévy's family created an international prize in probability theory in 2024.

Supported by BNP Paribas and awarded every two years, the Paul Lévy Prize is intended to reward a mathematician who has made outstanding contributions in the field of probability theory and its applications, broadly defined. The prize is open to scientists of any age from all over the world who have published work in international journals in the field of probability.