On the afternoon of October 20, Michel Talagrand, the 2024 Abel Prize laureate, delivered a lecture on mysteries in high dimension at Beihang University, attracting over 500 attendees, including faculty and students from more than 20 prestigious universities, such as Peking University and Tsinghua University, as well as participants from more than ten schools of Beihang University.

This was his first visit to China after winning the Abel Prize, one of the highest honors in mathematics and often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Mathematics."

Talagrand served as Research Director at CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) from 1985 to 2017, focusing on the geometrical features of high-dimensional space. He has made groundbreaking contributions to probability theory, functional analysis, and their applications in mathematical physics and statistics.

During the lecture, Talagrand expounded his views on high-dimensional space and vividly illustrated its counterintuitive properties using the example of a dart game. He then explored the structure of high-dimensional convex sets with significant intersection volume with the unit ball and based on this, presented an open problem that remains unsolved. The atmosphere of the lecture was lively, with attendees enthusiastically engaging in discussions.

Before the lecture, Zhao Weisheng, Vice President of Beihang University, awarded the honorary certificate of “Beihang Grand Lecture” to Michel Talagrand.

The lecture aims to encourage students to maintain a pure passion for mathematics and to forge ahead steadily through in-depth exchanges with top-tier mathematics teams both domestically and internationally. In the follow-up seminars, Talagrand will continue to share his academic insights on open problems.

Written by: Li Fei, Wang Peng

Photos by: Cai Yucheng

Reviewed by: Gao Jing

Edited by: Jia Aiping

Translated by: Qing Siyuan