Martin Hairer pursued his studies at the University of Geneva, where he received undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Physics in 1998, as well as a Ph.D. in Physics in 2001. He subsequently held positions at the University of Warwick (UK) and the Courant Institute (US), before moving to Imperial College London, where he currently holds a chair in probability and stochastic analysis. His work is in the general area of probability theory with a main focus on the analysis of stochastic partial differential equations. In particular, he recently developed the theory of regularity structures which allows to give a precise mathematical meaning to a number of such equations that were previously outside the scope of mathematical analysis.
Author of a monograph and over 100 research articles, Professor Hairer is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He was also awarded an honorary degree from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2016. His work has been distinguished with a number of prizes and awards, most notably the LMS Whitehead and Philip Leverhulme prizes in 2008, the Fermat prize in 2013, the Fröhlich prize and Fields Medal in 2014, a knighthood in 2016, and the Breakthrough prize in Mathematics in 2020.
This biography was written in the year the prize was awarded.