Wolfgang Doeblin Prize - Details

The Committee for Conferences on Stochastic Processes is pleased to announce the approval by the Bernoulli Society Council of a new prize. The prize is to honour the scientific work of Wolfgang Doeblin and to recognize and promote outstanding work by researchers at the beginning of their mathematical careers in the field of Probability.


Wolfgang Doeblin was born in Berlin in 1915. His family, of Jewish origin, were forced into exile and settled in Paris, where Doeblin attended the Sorbonne. From 1935, when he began work on Markov chains under Fréchet, until his death in 1940, he was occupied whenever he was able with research in Probability. In this short time he made many deep and original contributions.

From 1938, he served in the French Army and was stationed in defence of the German invasion, which came in May 1940. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for an action under enemy fire, to restore communications to his unit. Facing capture in June 1940, he took his own life.

Until the invasion, Doeblin had continued to work on mathematics. In February 1940 he sent to the Académie des Sciences de Paris a pli cacheté entitled Sur l'équation do Kolmogoroff. When finally in the year 2000 it was opened, it showed that he had understood many important ideas of modern Probability, including the potential crucial role of martingales.


The Wolfgang Doeblin Prize will be awarded for the first time in 2012 at the World Congress of the Bernoulli Society in Istanbul, and afterwards every two years.

It will be awarded to a single individual for work in the field of Probability, and who is at the beginning of his or her mathematical career.

The Wolfgang Doeblin Prize is generously supported by Springer. The awardee will be invited to submit to the journal Probability Theory and Related Fields a paper for publication as the Wolfgang Doeblin Prize Article, and will also be invited to present a Doeblin Prize Lecture in a later Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications or Bernoulli Society Congress.

James Norris Chair,
Committee for Conferences on Stochastic Processes

© Bernoulli Society