Michel Talagrand has been awarded the 2024 Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics, for “his groundbreaking contributions to probability theory and functional analysis, with outstanding applications in mathematical physics and statistics.” His work, deeply rooted in understanding the nuances of random processes that shape our world, has impacted fields ranging from weather forecasting to large language models. We tend to think of mathematics as dealing with things that are clear, fixed, and immutable; but nature is full of random phenomena (or things that, for all practic…