| Laurent Saloff-Coste | |
| Birth Date: | 1958 |
| Nationality: | French |
| Fields: | Analysis, Probability theory, Geometric group theory |
| Workplaces: | Cornell Toulouse III Paris VI |
| Alma Mater: | Paris VI |
| Thesis Title: | French: Analyse harmonique et analyse réelle sur les groupes |
| Thesis Year: | 1989 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Nicholas Varopoulos |
| Doctoral Students: | Tianyi Zheng |
| Awards: | Rollo Davidson Prize (1984) |
Laurent Saloff-Coste (born 1958) is a French mathematician whose research is in Analysis, Probability theory, and Geometric group theory. He is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University.
Saloff-Coste received his "doctorat de 3eme cycle" in 1983 at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris VI. He completed his "Doctorat d'Etat" in 1989 under Nicholas Varopoulos. In the 1990s, he worked as "French: Directeur de Recherche" (CNRS) at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse. Since 1998, he is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was chair from 2009 to 2015.
Saloff-Coste works in the areas of analysis and probability theory, including problems involving geometry and partial differential equations. In particular, he has studied the behavior of diffusion processes on manifolds and their fundamental solutions, in connection to the geometry of the underlying spaces. He also studies random walks on groups and how their behavior reflects the algebraic structure of the underlying group. He has developed quantitative estimates for the convergence of finite Markov chains and corresponding stochastic algorithms.
He received the Rollo Davidson Prize in 1994, and is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 2011 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.