Martin Hairer receives the Sylvester Medal from the Royal Society

The Sylvester Medal is awarded annually for outstanding contributions in the field of mathematics. The award was created in memory of the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester FRS, who was Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford in the 1880s. It was first awarded in 1901.

Martin Hairer has invigorated and advanced the field of stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) by providing a toolkit for addressing these previously thought inaccessible problems. Martin's work is also furthering the more general areas of stochastic analysis, a part of mathematics concerned with random processes, and stochastic dynamics. His breakthrough approach to the nonlinear Kardar-Parisi-Zhang SPDE allowed him to mathematically resolve the meaning of this equation and its solutions. Subsequently, he used his ideas to create the theory of regularity structures, which provides a way to tackle a broader class of SPDEs.

Professor Hairer has been awarded a number of major prizes for his contributions to the understanding of SPDEs, including the 2014 Fields Medal and the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.