The most notable change in the field of mathematics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been the growing recognition and acceptance of probabilistic methods in many branches of the subject, going well beyond their traditional uses in mathematical physics. At the same time, these methods have acquired new levels of rigour. The turning point is sometimes said to have been the award of a Fields Medal in 2006 to French mathematician Wendelin Werner, the first time the medal went to a probabilist, but the topic had acquired a central position well before then.

As noted above, probability theory was made into a rigorous branch of mathematics by Kolmogorov in the early 1930s. An early use of the new methods was a rigorous proof of the ergodic theorem by American mathematician George David Birkhoff in 1931. The air in a room can be used in an example of the theorem. When the system is in equilibrium, it can be defined by its temperature, which can be measured at regular intervals. The average of all these measurements over a period of time is called the time average of the temperature. On the other hand, the temperature can be measured at many places in the room at the same time, and those measurements can be averaged to obtain what is called the space average of the temperature. The ergodic theorem says that under certain circumstances and as the number of measurements increases indefinitely, the time average equals the space average. The theorem was immediately applied by American mathematician Joseph Leo Doob to give the first proof of Fisher’s law of maximum likelihood, which British statistician Ronald Fisher had put forward as a reliable way to estimate the right parameters in fitting a given probability distribution to a set of data. Thereafter, rigorous probability theory was developed by several mathematicians, including Doob in the United States, Paul Lévy in France, and a group who worked with Aleksandr Khinchin and Kolmogorov in the Soviet Union.

Doob’s work was extended by the Japanese mathematician Ito Kiyoshi, who did important work for many years on stochastic processes (that is, systems that evolve under a probabilistic rule). He obtained a calculus for these processes that generalizes the familiar rules of classical calculus to situations where it no longer applies. The Ito calculus found its most celebrated application in modern finance, where it underpins the Black-Scholes equation that is used in derivative trading.

However, it remained the case, as Doob often observed, that analysts and probabilists tended to keep their distance from each other and did not sufficiently appreciate the merits of thinking rigorously about probabilistic problems (which were often left to physicists) or of thinking probabilistically in purely analytical problems. This was despite the growing success of probabilistic methods in analytical number theory, a development energetically promoted by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in a seemingly endless stream of problems of varying levels of difficulty (many of which he offered money for their solution).

A major breakthrough in this subject occurred in 1981, although it goes back to the work of Poincaré in the 1880s. His celebrated recurrence theorem in celestial mechanics had made it very plausible that a particle moving in a bounded region of space will return infinitely often and arbitrarily close to any position it ever occupies. In the 1920s Birkhoff and others gave this theorem a rigorous formulation in the language of dynamical systems and measure theory, the same setting as the ergodic theorem. The result was quickly stripped of its trappings in the theory of differential equations and applied to a general setting of a transformation of a space to itself. If the space is compact (for example, a closed and bounded subset of Euclidean space such as Poincaré had considered, but the concept is much more general) and the transformation is continuous, then the recurrence theorem holds. In particular, in 1981 Israeli mathematician Hillel Furstenberg showed how to use these ideas to obtain results in number theory, specifically new proofs of theorems by Dutch mathematician Bartel van der Waerden and Hungarian American mathematician Endre Szemerédi.

Van der Waerden’s theorem states that if the positive integers are divided into any finite number of disjoint sets (i.e., sets without any members in common) and k is an arbitrary positive integer, then at least one of the sets contains an arithmetic progression of length k. Szemerédi’s theorem extends this claim to any subset of the positive integers that is suitably large. These results led to a wave of interest that influenced a most spectacular result: the proof by British mathematician Ben Green and Australian mathematician Terence Tao in 2004 that the set of prime numbers (which is not large enough for Szemerédi’s theorem to apply) also contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. This is one of a number of results in diverse areas of mathematics that led to Tao’s being awarded a Fields Medal in 2006.

Since then, Israeli mathematician Elon Lindenstrauss, Austrian mathematician Manfred Einsiedler, and Russian American mathematician Anatole Katok have been able to apply a powerful generalization of the methods of ergodic theory pioneered by Russian mathematician Grigory Margulis to show that Littlewood’s conjecture in number theory is true for all but a very small set of integers. This conjecture is the claim about how well any two irrational numbers, x and y, can be simultaneously approximated by rational numbers of the form p/n and q/n. For this and other applications of ergodic theory to number theory, Lindenstrauss was awarded a Fields Medal in 2010.

A major source of problems about probabilities is statistical mechanics, which grew out of thermodynamics and concerns with the motion of gases and other systems with too many dimensions to be treated any other way than probabilistically. For example, at room temperature there are around 10²⁷ molecules of a gas in a room.

Typically, a physical process is modeled on a lattice, which consists of large arrangements of points that have links to their immediate neighbours. For technical reasons, much work is confined to lattices in the plane. A physical process is modeled by ascribing a state (e.g., +1 or −1, spin up or spin down) and giving a rule that determines at each instant how each point changes its state according to the state of its neighbours. For example, if the lattice is modeling the gas in a room, the room should be divided into cells so small that there is either no molecule in the cell or exactly one. Mathematicians investigate what distributions and what rules produce an irreversible change of state.

A typical such question is percolation theory, which has applications in the study of petroleum deposits. A typical problem starts with a lattice of points in the plane with integer coordinates, some of which are marked with black dots (“oil”). If these black dots are made at random, or if they spread according to some law, how likely is it that the resulting distribution will form one connected cluster, in which any black dot is connected to any other through a chain of neighbouring black dots? The answer depends on the ratio of the number of black dots to the total number of dots, and the probability increases markedly as this ratio goes above a certain critical size. A central problem here, that of the crossing probability, concerns a bounded region of the plane inside which a lattice of points is marked out as described, and the boundary is divided into regions. The question is: What is the probability that a chain of black dots connects two given regions of the boundary?

If the view taken is that the problem is fundamentally finite and discrete, it is desirable that a wide range of discrete models or lattices lead to the same conclusions. This has led to the idea of a random lattice and a random graph, meaning the most typical one. One starts by considering all possible initial configurations, such as all possible different distributions of black and white dots in a given plane lattice, or all possible different ways a given collection of computers could be linked together. Depending on the rule chosen for colouring a dot (say, the toss of a fair coin) or the rule for linking two computers, one obtains an idea of what sorts of lattices or graphs are most likely to arise (in the lattice example, those with about the same number of black and white dots), and these most likely lattices are called random graphs. The study of random graphs has applications in physics, computer science, and many other fields.

The network of computers is an example of a graph. A good question is: How many computers should each computer be connected to before the network forms into very large connected chunks? It turns out that for graphs with a large number of vertices (say, a million or more) in which vertices are joined in pairs with probability p, there is a critical value for the number of connections on average at each vertex. Below this number the graph will almost certainly consist of many small islands, and above this number it will almost certainly contain one very large connected component, but not two or more. This component is called the giant component of the Erdös-Rényi model (after Erdös and Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rényi).

A major topic in statistical physics concerns the way substances change their state (e.g., from liquid to gas when they boil). In these phase transitions, as they are called, there is a critical temperature, such as the boiling point, and the useful parameter to study is the difference between this temperature and the temperature of the liquid or gas. It had turned out that boiling was described by a simple function that raises this temperature difference to a power called the critical exponent, which is the same for a wide variety of physical processes. The value of the critical exponent is therefore not determined by the microscopic aspects of the particular process but is something more general, and physicists came to speak of universality for the exponents. In 1982 American physicist Kenneth G. Wilson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for illuminating this problem by analyzing the way systems near a change of state exhibit self-similar behaviour at different scales (i.e., fractal behaviour). Remarkable though his work was, it left a number of insights in need of a rigorous proof, and it provided no geometric picture of how the system behaved.

The work for which Werner was awarded his Fields medal in 2006, carried out partly in collaboration with American mathematician Gregory Lawler and Israeli mathematician Oded Schramm, concerned the existence of critical exponents for various problems about the paths of a particle under Brownian motion, a typical setting for problems concerning crossing probabilities (that is, the probability for a particle to cross a specific boundary). Werner’s work has greatly illuminated the nature of the crossing curves, and the boundary of the regions that form in the lattice that are bounded by curves as the number of lattice points grows. In particular, he was able to show that Polish American mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot’s conjecture regarding the fractal dimension (a measure of a shape’s complexity) of the boundary of the largest of these sets was correct.

Mathematicians who regard these probabilistic models as approximations to a continuous reality seek to formulate what happens in the limit as the approximations improve indefinitely. This connects their work to an older domain of mathematics with many powerful theorems that can be applied once the limiting arguments have been secured. There are, however, very deep questions to be answered about this passage to the limit, and there are problems where it fails, or where the approximating process must be tightly controlled if convergence is to be established at all. In the 1980s the British physicist John Cardy, following the work of Russian physicist Aleksandr Polyakov and others, had established on strong informal grounds a number of results with good experimental confirmation that connected the symmetries of conformal field theories in physics to percolation questions in a hexagonal lattice as the mesh of the lattice shrinks to zero. In this setting a discrete model is a stepping stone on the way to a continuum model, and so, as noted, the central problem is to establish the existence of a limit as the number of points in the discrete approximations increases indefinitely and to prove properties about it. Russian mathematician Stanislav Smirnov established in 2001 that the limiting process for triangular lattices converged and gave a way to derive Cardy’s formulae rigorously. He went on to produce an entirely novel connection between complex function theory and probability that enabled him to prove very general results about the convergence of discrete models to the continuum case. For this work, which has applications to such problems as how liquids can flow through soil, he was awarded a Fields Medal in 2010.