
Jean Francois le Gall
Wolf Prize Laureate in Mathematics 2019

The Prize Committee for Mathematics has unanimously decided that the 2019 Wolf Prize be awarded to Jean Francois le Gall and Gregory Lawler.
Jean Francois le Gall
Université Paris-Sud ,France
Jean-François Le Gall has made several deep and elegant contributions to the theory of stochastic processes. His work on the fine properties of Brownian motions solved many difficult problems, such as the characterization of sets visited multiple times and the behavior of the volume of its neighborhood – the Brownian sausage. Le Gall made groundbreaking advances in the theory of branching processes, which arise in many applications. In particular, his introduction of the Brownian snake and his studies of its properties revolutionized the theory of super-processes – generalizations of Markov processes to an evolving cloud of dying and splitting particles. He then used some of these tools for achieving a spectacular breakthrough in the mathematical understanding of 2D quantum gravity. Le Gall established the convergence of uniform planar maps to a canonical random metric object, the Brownian map, and showed that it almost surely has Hausdorff dimension 4 and is homeomorphic to the 2-spher
