He was Professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and a member of the French Academy of Sciences from 1979 to 2010.

On 27 April 1965 he married Marie-Paule Brameret, who was also a mathematician and with whom he published several mathematical papers.

[2] Malliavin's early work was in harmonic analysis, where he derived important results on the spectral synthesis problem, providing definitive answers to fundamental questions in this field, including a complete characterization of 'band-limited' functions whose Fourier transform has compact support, known as the Beurling-Malliavin theorem.

[4] In stochastic analysis, Malliavin is known for his work on the stochastic calculus of variation, now known as the Malliavin calculus, a mathematical theory which has found many applications in Monte Carlo simulation and mathematical finance.

Using this integration by parts formula, Malliavin initiated a probabilistic approach to Hörmander's theorem for hypo-elliptic operators and gave a condition for the existence of smooth densities for Wiener functionals in terms of their Malliavin covariance matrix.