Having retired from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (now Sorbonne Université) in 2013, after spending his entire academic career there, Paul Deheuvels sadly passed away last January. Son of the French mathematician René Deheuvels, Paul was born in Istanbul, where his father was teaching at the French Lycée. He spent his younger years in Princeton and New Haven, where his father was visiting the Institute for Advanced Study and Yale University, respectively. The family then returned to Bourg-la-Reine, in suburban Paris, where Paul Deheuvels spent the rest of his life, apart from academic visits and mountaineering trips.

Paul Deheuvels was a precocious and exceptional student, entering the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) at age 19, becoming the youngest graduate of the mathematics agrégation (an elite teaching qualification) at age 21, and being hired as the youngest full professor at Université Pierre et Marie Curie at age 26.

His contributions to mathematical statistics and probability theory are numerous and impactful. He worked on extreme values, empirical processes, iterated logarithm refinements, copulas, and nonparametric statistics. For instance, he extended extreme value theory to multivariate settings with deep convergence results. He made considerable progress on kernel density estimators, especially for the challenging problem of tail estimation. He further contributed to the construction and understanding of nonparametric tests based on order statistics. His scientific papers and conferences were written with absolute mathematical rigour and conciseness, as well as beautiful calligraphy on the blackboards he always used for his presentations.

He was able to combine this strong mathematical inclination with an enthusiasm for applied statistics, as demonstrated by his creating in 1980 the (first) statistics lab at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, the Laboratory of Theoretical and Applied Statistics (LSTA), which he directed until 2013. He also acted as a consultant for TotalEnergies and the pharmaceutical company Sanofi for several decades.

Paul Deheuvels was also recognised for his mentoring qualities. He advised more than a hundred PhD students, including Michel Broniatowski, Adrian Raftery, Zhan Shi and Jean-David Fermanian. His mentorship and support often extended way beyond the PhD years and included junior colleagues at Université Pierre et Marie Curie.

He became an IMS Fellow in 1986 and was elected to the French Academy of Sciences (as the first statistician) in 2000, after receiving the Prix Gegner from this academy. He was also the first recipient of the Prix Pierre-Simon de Laplace from the French Statistical Society (SfDS), jointly with Pascal Massart (Orsay).

Paul Deheuvels is survived by his mother, his wife, four daughters and twelve grandchildren.

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Written by Christian Robert & Adrian Raftery