Albert Badrikian (January 11, 1933 in Lyon – July 31, 1994 in a crevasse of the Bossons Glacier in the Mont Blanc massif) was a French mathematician and professor of mathematics at the Blaise Pascal University. Badrikian co-founded the renowned and influential summer school École d’Été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour with Paul-Louis Hennequin.
He specialized in stochastic processes, measure theory, and ε-entropy in information theory.
Early life and education.
Badrikian was born on January 11 in 1933 in Lyon, as the third child of a family that had immigrated from Armenia. He attended university in Lyon, where he wrote two thesis papers, including one on stochastic processes in Banach spaces, and completed his Diplôme d’études supérieures spécialisées in 1952. Afterward, he worked for several years as an assistant and teacher in secondary schools.
Afterwards he became a research intern at the CNRS in the "Laboratoire de Probabilités" at Université Paris IV in Paris, under the guidance of Robert Fortet. He served in the French military from 1960 to 1962. After returning to the CNRS in 1962, he began his doctoral studies under Fortet's supervision. During this period, he also sought advice from Laurent Schwartz. On December 18, 1967, he defended his dissertation "Les éléments aléatoires vectoriels et leurs fonctionnelles caractéristiques" and received the CNRS Bronze Medal for his work.
In the late 1965 Badrikian received an invitation to the Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, where he became a lecturer in 1968, a professor without chair in 1970, and a titular professor in 1972. He was instrumental in acquiring many books from the Russian school of mathematics for the university library. It was also particularly important to him to introduce young students to research. Between 1967 and 1969, he published articles on cylindrical measures and linear random functions, which were later compiled into a book titled "Séminaire sur les fonctions aléatoires linéaires et les mesures cylindriques" in 1970. During this time, French probabilists had frequent interactions, and probability theorists from Clermont-Ferrand, Lyon, and Dijon met quarterly. Badrikian also attended the NATO summer school on "probabilistic methods in analysis" and was a guest lecturer at Université du Québec, University of Toronto, and in Vienna.
From 1969 to 1970 Badrikian participated in the Laurent Schwartz seminar and gave five lectures there. In April 1971 he attended the "Colloquium on Functional Analysis" in Bordeaux, and in June 1973, he visited the "Colloquium on Gaussian Processes" in Strasbourg with Simon Chevet. In 1971, he co-founded the École d’Été de Probabilités de Saint-Flour with Paul-Louis Hennequin. In 1974, Badrikian held a course titled "Prolegomenon to Probability Calculus in Banach Spaces", which was later published.
In 1982 he lectured at University of Mossul in Iraq, and in the same year he was invited to speak at the international colloquium on "Measure Theory and Its Applications" at Université de Sherbrooke in Canada. He returned to Sherbrooke in 1986 and gave a lecture on stochastic analysis. In 1987, he visited Sherbrooke again, as well as the universities in Montreal and Ottawa. In 1988, he was invited to the "Chinese-French Center for Mathematics" in Wuhan, China, where he visited seven times before his death. In 1989, he gave a course on "stochastic integration and stochastic differential equations" at Universidad de Chile in Santiago de Chile. In 1990, he was promoted from associate professor to extraordinary professor. In 1991, he was invited by the "Latin American School for Probability and Statistics" to give a course. In 1992, he went to Wrocław in Poland to establish a scientific partnership.
Badrikian died on July 31 in 1994 in a fall into a crevasse on the Glacier des Bossons while preparing for a new ascent of the Mont Blanc massif.
Badrikian was the doctoral advisor of Pierre Bernard.