Donald Andrew Dawson (born June 4, 1937) is a Canadian mathematician, specializing in probability.
Education and career
Dawson received in 1958 his bachelor's degree and in 1959 his master's degree from McGill University and in 1963 his PhD from MIT under Henry McKean with thesis Constructions of Diffusions with Specified Mean Hitting Times and Hitting Probabilities.[1] In 1962/63 he was an engineer in the aerospace department of Raytheon. At McGill University he became in 1963 an assistant professor and in 1967 an associate professor. At Carleton University he became in 1970 an associate professor and in 1971 a professor, working in this position until 1996.
From 1996 to 2000 Dawson was the director of the Fields Institute and during these years also an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. From 2000 to 2010 he was an adjunct professor at McGill University.
Research
Dawson works on stochastic processes, measure-valued processes, and hierarchical stochastic systems with applications in information systems, genetics, evolutionary biology, and economics. He has written 8 monographs and over 150 refereed publications.
with Edwin A. Perkins: Measure-valued processes and Renormalization of Branching Particle Systems, in R. Carmona, B. Rozovskii Stochastic Partial Differential Equations: Six Perspectives, American Mathematical Society Mathematical Surveys and Monographs, vol. 64, 1999, pp. 45–106.
with J. Gärtner: Large deviations, free energy functional and quasi-potential for a mean field model of interacting diffusions, American Mathematical Society 1989
