The 2026 André-Aisenstadt prize awarded to Benjamin Landon (University of Toronto)

Benjamin Landon was born in Kenora, Ontario. He received a B.Sc. and M.Sc from McGill University under the supervision of Robert Seiringer and Vojkan Jakšić. He then earned a PhD from Harvard University in 2018 under the supervision of Horng-Tzer Yau. From 2018-2021 he was a CLE Moore Instructor at MIT and then joined the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in 2021. 

Landon’s research investigates the universality of eigenvalue fluctuations of large random matrices, which is a generalization of the classical central limit theorem to large systems of highly correlated random variables. The main problem is to prove that the asymptotic properties of the eigenvalues depend only on the symmetry class of the random matrix and are otherwise independent of the specific details of the model. Landon proved the local ergodicity of Dyson Brownian motion in generic settings which is now used as the state-of-the-art black box for obtaining universality for the local correlation functions of wide classes of random matrices. He has also contributed foundational results concerning extremal spectral statistics and shown that Johansson’s CLT for Wigner matrices holds under an optimal regularity condition.

His contributions, obtained alone and with collaborators, put Landon among the most accomplished researchers in random matrix theory in the world and he has also obtained profound results in several other areas within mathematical physics, among them work on the spectral theory of Schrödinger operators, work on spherical spin glasses, and on growth models in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class.