2024 Abel Prize

Michel Talagrand has won the 2024 Abel Prize “for his groundbreaking contributions to probability theory and functional analysis, with outstanding applications in mathematical physics and statistics.”

• The Law of Large numbers and Talagrand’s inequalities
• Stochastic Processes
• Concentration of measure: The sum of a large number of sufficiently independent random variables will be concentrated in an interval which is much narrower than is intuitive. (Think of the curse of dimensionality)

The citation had callbacks to applications of Talagrand’s work in Large Language Models and I’m wondering how much of that was a publicity stunt by the Abel Prize committee. I’m sure there are far more exciting applications and that the inclusion of LLMs at a time when their hype is at its peak is just a coincidence.