Sir Martin Hairer, Fields Medal 2014

Sir Martin Hairer KBE FRS (born 14 November 1975 in Geneva, Switzerland) is an Austrian=British mathematician working in the field of stochastic analysis, in particular stochastic partial differential equations. He is Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College London, having previously held appointments at the University of Warwick and the Courant Institute of New York University. In 2014 he was awarded the Fields Medal, one of the highest honours a mathematician can achieve.

Education

Hairer attended the College Claparede Geneva where he received his high school diploma in 1994, followed by the University of Geneva, where he obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics in July 1998, Master of Science in Physics in October 1998 and PhD in Physics under the supervision of Jean-Pierre Eckmann in November 2001.

Research and career

Hairer is one of the world's foremost leaders in the field of stochastic partial differential equations in particular, and in stochastic analysis and stochastic dynamics in general. By bringing new ideas to the subject he made fundamental advances in many important directions such as the study of variants of Hörmander's theorem, systematisation of the construction of Lyapunov functions for stochastic systems, development of a general theory of ergodicity for non-Markovian systems, multiscale analysis techniques, theory of homogenisation, theory of path sampling and, most recently, theory of rough paths and the newly introduced theory of regularity structures.

Under the name HairerSoft, he develops Macintosh software.

Awards

• Whitehead Prize (2008)
• Philip Leverhulme Prize (2008)
• Wolfson Research Merit Award (2009)
• Fermat Prize (2013)
• Fröhlich Prize (2014)
• Fields Medal (2014)
• Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics (2021)