Ofer Zeitouni, professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science and NYU Courant Institute, was awarded the 2026 Paul Lévy Prize in Probability Theory during the 45th Conference on Stochastic Processes and Their Applications. The conference was held in Ithaca, New York, June 14–20.
A native of Israel, Zeitouni studied at the Technion, where he completed his PhD in electrical engineering in 1986 under the direction of Moshe Zakai. He did his postdoc at Brown University and MIT.
Since 2007, Zeitouni has been at the Weizmann Institute, where his research has focused on large deviations theory, the spectral theory of random matrices, motion in random media, and extremes of logarithmically correlated fields. Upon receiving the award, Zeitouni noted, “Paul Lévy was one of the founding fathers of the theory of stochastic processes and had a deep understanding of their fine properties. I am deeply honored and humbled to be awarded a prize named after him.”
Zeitouni is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and Institute of Mathematical Statistics and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, US National Academy of Sciences, and Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
The Lévy prize was created in honor of French mathematician Paul Lévy, who largely shaped modern probability theory, introducing fundamental concepts such as local time, stable distributions, and characteristic functions.
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