The Rolf Tarrach Prize 2025, recognising the best doctoral thesis of the academic year at the University of Luxembourg, has been awarded Wednesday 9 July to the brilliant young mathematician Dr Tara Trauthwein.
The bulk of her thesis, ‘Quantitative CLTs on the Poisson space via Skorohod estimates and p-Poincaré inequalities’, was published in the prestigious journal Annals of Applied Probability and developed substantial new mathematics for graph models, which can be used to model the internet, telecommunications, societies, ecosystems, the economy, the brain, social networks, and AI, among others.
A worldwide impact in mathematics, economy and medicine
Her discoveries are already being cited by mathematicians worldwide, for stochastic processes (useful for modelling e.g. price evolution on the stock market) and in statistical medicine, to improve the estimation of treatment efficiency. “These groundbreaking contributions will for sure have a strong impact on probability theory for decades”, remarked Prof. Giovanni Peccati, her supervisor.
Dr Tara Trauthwein
An alumna of the University of Luxembourg, Dr Tara Trauthwein completed her PhD in Mathematics in 2023. During her time at the University, she was also active in student leadership and science outreach, helping organise events for young people interested in mathematics.
Currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford, and set to start another postdoc at the University of Münster in October this year, she completed a Master’s degree at the University of Cambridge with a mean grade of 97.3%. Dr Tara Trauthwein isn’t a stranger to awards, starting with recognitions as the best high-school graduate of Luxembourg in 2015, a Top Student Award during her Bachelor at the University of Luxembourg in 2017 and a Luxembourg Mathematical Society Award in 2018 for her outstanding academic results.
The jury was presided by Gérard Hoffmann, Chairman of Les Amis de l’Université du Luxembourg, Marc Flammang (CEO of Intesa Sanpaolo Wealth Management Luxembourg, and sponsor), Romain Raux, Rick Serrano and Romain Penning. They distinguished the innovative character of the thesis, its scientific excellence and its impact on the national and international reputation of the University of Luxembourg. The sponsors of the evening, who generously provided the prize money for the Award, were Intesa Sanpaolo Wealth Management Luxembourg and the Luis y Antonio Portabella Foundation.
