Person: Meyer (2), Paul-André
Paul-André Meyer was a French mathematician who worked in the theory of stochastic processes.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Paul-André attended a French school in Buenos Aires but, spending six years there from the age of six to the age of twelve, he became fluent in Spanish.
- Back in France, Paul-André entered the lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris.
- It was at this school that Paul-André fell in love with advanced mathematics, mainly due to an outstanding mathematics teacher M Heilbronn who was an expert mathematician having obtained a doctorate with a thesis Les équations aux dérivées partielles selon Jules Drach Ⓣ(Partial differential equations according to Jules Drach).
- Paul-André, who spent four years in Heilbronn's classes, obtained his baccalaureate in 1952.
- Paul-André spent the following two years preparing to take the entrance examinations for the grandes écoles.
- Remarkably she had, like Meyer, lived in Buenos Aires and had even studied at the same French school there although they had not met at that time.
- By the end of the year, Meyer had assimilated the probabilistic techniques and was ready to begin his own research; this was the time when Gilbert Hunt was publishing, in the United States, two fundamental memoirs which were renewing at the same time potential theory and the theory of Markov processes by establishing a precise link, in a very general framework, between an important class of Markov processes and the class of kernels in potential theory which French probabilists had just been studying.
- Meyer, who was in close relation with these potentialists, and who was quite knowledgeable about convex functional analysis, was particularly well positioned to explore Hunt's theory.
- In 1961, under the guidance of Jacques Deny, Meyer defended his thesis on multiplicative and additive functionals of Markov processes, which established him at once as a top researcher among probabilists and potentialists.
- Meyer had spent time at Berkeley following Loève's visit to Paris and, while in the United States, he met Joseph Doob.
- He had already read Doob's classic text Stochastic Processes and these events all came together to give Meyer's research career an inspiring beginning.
- Perhaps the best description of what book contains is given in Meyer's Introduction.
- This series, published by Springer in their Lecture Notes in Mathematics series, contains remarkable work by Meyer.
- In the many volumes, published between 1967 and 1993, Meyer systematically discussed the main developments of the moment, mainly concentrating on his own work and work of his students and collaborators.
- In many ways one can consider Meyer's work improving on that of others to be as important, and adding as much to the progress of mathematics, as his original research.
- In collaboration with Claude Dellacherie, Meyer wrote five volumes between 1975 and 1992 entitled Probabilités et Potentiel Ⓣ(Probability and potential).
- This title was identical to that of Meyer's single-authored text of 1966 and indeed was considered by the authors as a revision and updating of that earlier text.
- In 1993 Meyer published Quantum probability for probabilists.
- We were sometimes ten people, sometimes three people, and we listened to Meyer.
- Meyer received many honours for his mathematical contributions including the Peccot Prize, the Maurice Audin Prize and the Ampère Prize.
- Following his death the Institut de Recherche Mathématique Avancée at Strasbourg created the Meyer Prize which is awarded annually to an outstanding young probabilist working in the field of stochastic processes.
Born 21 August 1934, Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, France. Died 30 January 2003, Strasbourg, France.
View full biography at MacTutor
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
