Probability experts awarded Abel maths prize

OSLO: The Abel Prize for mathematics was on Wednesday awarded to Israeli-American Hillel Furstenberg and Russian-born Gregory Margulis, both probability experts, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters said. The pair were honoured “for pioneering the use of methods from probability and dynamics in group theory, number theory and combinatorics,” the Academy said in a statement. Furstenberg, 84, is affiliated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, while Margulis, a decade younger, is at Yale University. Furstenberg and Margulis invented so-called random walk techniques, or a path consisting of a succession of random steps. The study of random walks is a central branch of probability theory. The pair used the technique “to investigate mathematical objects such as groups and graphs, and in so doing introduced probabilistic methods to solve many open problems,” the statement said. Their work “has opened up a wealth of new results” in diverse areas of mathematics and “brought down the traditional wall between pure and applied mathematics”. Born in Berlin, Furstenberg and his Jewish family fled Nazi Germany for the US just before the start of World War II. After starting his career at top universities like Princeton and MIT, he left the United States for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1965 and stayed there until his retirement in 2003.