Since 2016, Clermont Auvergne University's Blaise-Pascal Mathematics Laboratory (LMBP) has awarded a prize for a mathematics thesis defended in France during the two years preceding the award ceremony. The prize comes with €4,000 from a fund bequeathed in the will of a mathematician keen to encourage young people, and is awarded alternately for research in pure and applied mathematics. Its international jury brings together the LMBP's directors and several distinguished external members, such as Laure Saint-Raymond in 2017 and Fanny Kassel in 2020. The inaugural prize went to Tony Yue Yu, a young prodigy also honored by the American Clay Mathematics Institute for research linking different geometries with theoretical physics. The latest recipient, Timothée Bénard, is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge (Great Britain) whose research concerns random walks on homogeneous spaces of infinite volume. In 2020, the prize was awarded to Cathy Swaenepoel, whose research focuses on the digits occurring in prime numbers and other notable sequences. In particular, her thesis provides partial answers to the question of whether there exist prime numbers written using only 1s in base 2. This question was raised by Marin Mersenne… one of Blaise Pascal's mentors!
