Robert McCann (University of Toronto) awarded the 2026 CRM-Fields-PIMS prize

Robert McCann completed his PhD in 1994 at Princeton, under the supervision of Elliott Lieb. After spending four years as an assistant professor at Brown University, he moved to Toronto in 1998. Since 2020, he has held the Canada Research Chair in Mathematics, Economics and Physics at the University of Toronto. He has received numerous awards for his work; the most recent award is the AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics for 2025.

He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 2014.

Professor McCann’s early achievement was the introduction of displacement convexity, a concept which has become central to modern optimal transport theory. This led to the linking of optimal transport with geometric notions of curvature and was at the foundation of a robust theory of metric measure spaces, a rapidly developing branch of modern mathematics.

McCann also made significant contributions to the regularity theory of optimal transport maps, particularly in connection to the curvature and convexity properties of the underlying spaces.

Beyond his research, Robert McCann has an excellent track record as a mentor and serving the mathematical community. He supervised or currently supervises 15 PhD students and inspired a large number of postdocs.

In the words of the selection committee, Professor McCann “was awarded the CRM-Fields-PIMS prize for his unparalleled contributions to the foundations and applications of the theory of optimal transportation and the impact of his work on the development of mathematics, physics, and economics, as well as his leadership in the mathematical sciences community.”