Paul Pierre Lévy (15 September 1886 – 15 December 1971)[2] was a French mathematician who was active especially in probability theory, introducing fundamental concepts such as local time, stable distributions and characteristic functions.

Lévy attended the École Polytechnique and published his first paper in 1905, at the age of nineteen, while still an undergraduate, in which he introduced the Lévy–Steinitz theorem.

In 1920 he was appointed Professor of Analysis at the École Polytechnique, where his students included Benoît Mandelbrot and Georges Matheron.

He remained at the École Polytechnique until his retirement in 1959, with a gap during World War II after his 1940 firing because of the Vichy anti-Jewish legislation.

He also introduced, independently from Aleksandr Khinchin, the notion of infinitely divisible law and derived their characterization through the Lévy–Khintchine representation.