Thorsten Schmidt

Thorsten Schmidt is Professor of Mathematical Stochastics at the University of Freiburg, succeeding Prof. Ernst Eberlein in the summer semester of 2015. He also serves as Senior Financial Engineer at MathFinance. Previously, he held professorships at Chemnitz University of Technology (2008-2015), Technical University Munich (2008), and University of Leipzig (2004 onwards). From 2017-2019, he was a Research Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) in a joint research group with the University of Strasbourg and USIAS on the topic of Linking Finance and Insurance.

His research focuses primarily on financial and actuarial mathematics, stochastic processes, and statistics, with recent work on machine learning methods and their applications in financial mathematics and AI regulation. In Freiburg, his goal with his young team is to tackle complex challenges with improved mathematical models and apply these methodologies to various fields.

• Key Research Areas:
• Financial mathematics and credit risks
• Pricing and hedging of derivative financial products
• Statistics of stochastic processes
• Energy markets and nonlinear filter theory
• Machine learning applications in finance and insurance

His recent publications show a strong trend toward integrating machine learning with traditional mathematical finance, particularly in risk management, insurance-finance arbitrage, and robust financial modeling. His work increasingly addresses ethical considerations in AI applications within finance, reflecting his broader interest in responsible AI development.

• Notable Awards:
• IDA Award Finance (2015)
• FRIAS-USIAS Research Fellow (2017/2018)
• IDA Award Machine Learning and AI (2020)
• MAPFRE Research Grant (2020)
• Luis Bachelier Fellow (2021)

As Editor-in-Chief of Statistics and Risk Modeling and Associate Editor for Mathematical Finance and International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance, Schmidt plays a significant role in academic publishing. He leads the CRC 'Small Data' research center with Harald Binder, focusing on medical problems where disease progression must be estimated with few data points per patient. His LeanAI project, funded by the Vector Foundation, explores the connection between machine learning and theorem-proving software LEAN, aiming to develop AI that can translate between mathematics and formal proof systems.

His laboratory work centers around the application of stochastic methods combined with machine learning to solve problems in finance and insurance where data is limited ('Small Data' initiative), with significant funding from DFG (€12 million for CRC Small Data) and the Carl Zeiss Foundation.