Among the problems proposed by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900, the sixth called for the axiomatization of those branches of physics in which mathematics plays a predominant role.
The prize awarded to the French researcher, which she shares with Italy's Camillo de Lellis (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey) and American mathematician Lawrence Guth (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), was established by the AMS in 1923 in memory of the American mathematician Maxime Bôcher. Every three years, it recognizes an outstanding research paper in analysis published during the previous six years. Laure Saint-Raymond, born in 1975, certainly qualifies: she has already received numerous other awards (the European Mathematical Society's 2008 prize, the AMS's 2009 Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize, the 2011 Irène Joliot-Curie Prize and the 2015 Fermat Prize…). On this occasion, two of her papers were singled out. One, co-authored with Thierry Bodineau (CNRS) and Isabelle Gallagher (ENS Paris), shows how the dynamics of N rigid particles of radius r are connected to Brownian motion as N tends to infinity and r tends to 0. This is precisely the question connected with Hilbert's sixth problem. The other, co-authored with Anne-Laure Dalibard (Sorbonne Universités), updates our understanding of the interactions between coastline geometry and ocean flow.
