Malliavin was the son of René Malliavin, also known as Michel Dacier, a political writer and journalist, and Madeleine Delavenne, a physician. On 27 April 1965 he married Marie-Paule Brameret, who was also a mathematician and with whom he published several mathematical papers.[2][3] They had two children.[2]
Scientific contributions
Malliavin's early work was in harmonic analysis, where he derived important results on the spectral synthesis problem, providing definitive answers to fundamental questions in this field, including a complete characterization of 'band-limited' functions whose Fourier transform has compact support, known as the Beurling-Malliavin theorem.[4]
As stated by Stroock and Yor: "Like Norbert Wiener, Paul Malliavin came to probability theory from harmonic analysis, and, like Wiener, his analytic origins were apparent in everything he did there."[5]
Malliavin introduced a differential operator on Wiener space, now called the Malliavin derivative, and derived an integration by parts formula for Wiener functionals. Using this integration by parts formula, Malliavin initiated a probabilistic approach to Hörmander's theorem for hypo-elliptic operators and gave a condition for the existence of smooth densities for Wiener functionals in terms of their Malliavin covariance matrix.
Malliavin, Paul (1978). "Stochastic calculus of variations and hypoelliptic operators". Proceedings of the International Symposium on Stochastic Differential Equations (Res. Inst. Math. Sci., Kyoto Univ., Kyoto, 1976). New York: Wiley. pp. 195–263. MR536013
Geometrie differentielle stochastique, Presses de l’Universite de Montreal, 1978
with Hélène Airault, Leslie Kay, Gérard Letac: Integration and Probability, Springer, 1995