!['I had such fun!', says winner of top maths prize](https://thepeninsulaqatar.com/get/maximage/20240320_1710946359-995.jpg?1710946359)
'I had such fun!', says winner of top maths prize
The Peninsula
Paris: For Michel Talagrand, who won the Abel mathematics prize on Wednesday, maths provided a fun life free from all constraints and an escape fro...
Paris: For Michel Talagrand, who won the Abel mathematics prize on Wednesday, maths provided a fun life free from all constraints -- and an escape from the eye problems he suffered as a child.
"Maths, the more you do it, the easier it gets," the 72-year-old said in an interview with AFP.
He is the fifth French Abel winner since the award was created by Norway's government in 2003 to compensate for the lack of a Nobel prize in mathematics.
Talagrand's career in functional analysis and probability theory saw him tame some of the incredibly complicated limits of random behaviour.
But the mathematician said he had just been "studying very simple things by understanding them absolutely thoroughly."