George C. Papanicolaou (/ˌpæpəˈnɪkəlaʊ/; born January 23, 1943) is a Greek-American mathematician who specializes in applied and computational mathematics, partial differential equations, and stochastic processes.

His PhD thesis, performed under the supervision of Joseph Bishop Keller was entitled "On Stochastic Differential Equations and Applications".

[3] Papanicolaou has more than 250 publications[5][6] on a wide range of topics, including imaging, communications and time reversal, waves in random media, convection-diffusion, nonlinear waves, high contrast materials, mathematical finance, and homogenization.

George Papanicolaou is a member of the National Academy of Sciences,[7] and he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[8] the American Mathematical Society (AMS), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

He was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship (1974), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983), the von Neumann Lectureship from SIAM (2006), the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics[9] (2010), the Gibbs Lectureship of the AMS (2011), and the Lagrange Prize[10] from ICIAM (2019).