Mark Iosifovich Freidlin is a Russian-American probability theorist who works as a Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is one of the namesakes of the Freidlin–Wentzell theory, which is an important part of the large deviations theory. Freidlin and Wentzell are the authors of the first monograph on the large deviations theory for stochastic processes. The Freidlin-Wentzell theory describes, in particular, the long-time effects caused by random perturbations. The latest edition of the book was published by Springer in 2012. It contains not just the results on large deviations but also new results on other asymptotic problems, in particular, on the averaging principle for stochastic perturbations. Other works of Mark Freidlin concern perturbations of Hamiltonian systems, wave front propagation in reaction-diffusion equations, non-linear perturbations of partial differential equations. stochasticity in deterministic dynamical systems.
Friedlin was born in 1938 in Moscow.