Luis Angel Caffarelli (born December 8, 1948) is an
Argentine
Argentines (mistakenly translated Argentineans in the past; in Spanish (masculine) or (feminine)) are people identified with the country of Argentina. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Argentines, s ...
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
and luminary in the field of
partial differential equations
In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which imposes relations between the various partial derivatives of a multivariable function.
The function is often thought of as an "unknown" to be solved for, similarly to ...
and their applications.
Career
Caffarelli was born and grew up in
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...
. He obtained his Masters of Science (1968) and Ph.D. (1972) at the
University of Buenos Aires
The University of Buenos Aires ( es, Universidad de Buenos Aires, UBA) is a public university, public research university in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Established in 1821, it is the premier institution of higher learning in the country and one o ...
. His Ph.D. advisor was
Calixto Calderón. He currently holds the Sid Richardson Chair at the
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
. He also has been a professor at the
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...
, the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
, and the
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (commonly known as Courant or CIMS) is the mathematics research school of New York University (NYU), and is among the most prestigious mathematics schools and mathematical sciences research cente ...
at
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, the ...
. From 1986 to 1996 he was a professor at the
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...
in Princeton.
Important results
Caffarelli received great recognition with his breakthrough paper "The regularity of free boundaries in higher dimensions" published in 1977 in ''
Acta Mathematica
''Acta Mathematica'' is a peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal covering research in all fields of mathematics.
According to Cédric Villani, this journal is "considered by many to be the most prestigious of all mathematical research journ ...
''. Since then, he has been considered one of the world's leading experts in
free boundary problem In mathematics, a free boundary problem (FB problem) is a partial differential equation to be solved for both an unknown function u and an unknown domain \Omega. The segment \Gamma of the boundary of \Omega which is not known at the outset of the p ...
s and
nonlinear partial differential equation
In mathematics and physics, a nonlinear partial differential equation is a partial differential equation with nonlinear system, nonlinear terms. They describe many different physical systems, ranging from gravitation to fluid dynamics, and have be ...
s. He developed several regularity results for fully nonlinear elliptic equations including the
Monge-Ampere equation. He is also famous for his contributions to
homogenization
Homogeneity is a sameness of constituent structure.
Homogeneity, homogeneous, or homogenization may also refer to:
In mathematics
*Transcendental law of homogeneity of Leibniz
* Homogeneous space for a Lie group G, or more general transformati ...
. Recently, he has taken an interest in
Integro-differential equation
In mathematics, an integro-differential equation is an equation that involves both integrals and derivatives of a function.
General first order linear equations
The general first-order, linear (only with respect to the term involving derivati ...
s.
One of his most cited and celebrated results regards the ''Partial regularity of suitable weak solutions of the
Navier–Stokes equations
In physics, the Navier–Stokes equations ( ) are partial differential equations which describe the motion of viscous fluid substances, named after French engineer and physicist Claude-Louis Navier and Anglo-Irish physicist and mathematician Geo ...
'', obtained in 1982 in collaboration with
Louis Nirenberg
Louis Nirenberg (February 28, 1925 – January 26, 2020) was a Canadian-American mathematician, considered one of the most outstanding mathematicians of the 20th century.
Nearly all of his work was in the field of partial differential equat ...
and
Robert V. Kohn.
Awards and recognition
In 1991 he was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
. He has been awarded ''Doctor Honoris Causa'' from l'
École Normale Supérieure
École may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France
* École, Savoi ...
, Paris;
University of Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame du Lac, known simply as Notre Dame ( ) or ND, is a private Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, outside the city of South Bend. French priest Edward Sorin founded the school in 1842. The main campu ...
;
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
The Autonomous University of Madrid ( es, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid; UAM), commonly known as simply la Autónoma, is a Spanish public university located in Madrid, Spain. The university was founded in 1968 alongside the Autonomous Universi ...
, and
Universidad de La Plata, Argentina. He received the
Bôcher Memorial Prize
The Bôcher Memorial Prize was founded by the American Mathematical Society in 1923 in memory of Maxime Bôcher with an initial endowment of $1,450 (contributed by members of that society). It is awarded every three years (formerly every five year ...
in 1984. Caffarelli is listed as an
ISI highly cited researcher
The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysis, ...
.
In 2003
Konex Foundation
Konex Foundation (''Fundación Konex'')is an Argentine cultural non-profit organization created in 1980 ''to promote, stimulate, help, and participate in any form of cultural, educational, intellectual, artistic, social, philanthropic, scientific ...
from Argentina granted him the Diamond
Konex Award
Konex Foundation Awards, or simply Konex Awards, are cultural awards from the Konex Foundation honouring Argentine cultural personalities.
History and purpose
Konex Awards are granted by the Konex Foundation, created in 1980 in Argentina. The pur ...
, one of the most prestigious awards in Argentina, as the most important Scientist of his country in the last decade. In 2005, he received the prestigious
Rolf Schock Prize
The Rolf Schock Prizes were established and endowed by bequest of philosopher and artist Rolf Schock (1933–1986). The prizes were first awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1993 and, since 2005, are awarded every three years. Each recipient current ...
of the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences ( sv, Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien) is one of the Swedish Royal Academies, royal academies of Sweden. Founded on 2 June 1739, it is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization that takes special ...
"for his important contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations". He also received the
Leroy P. Steele Prize
The Leroy P. Steele Prizes are awarded every year by the American Mathematical Society, for distinguished research work and writing in the field of mathematics. Since 1993, there has been a formal division into three categories.
The prizes have b ...
for Lifetime Achievement in Mathematics in 2009. In 2012 he was awarded the
Wolf Prize in Mathematics
The Wolf Prize in Mathematics is awarded almost annually by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Chemistry, Medicine, Physics and Arts. ...
(jointly with
Michael Aschbacher
Michael George Aschbacher (born April 8, 1944) is an American mathematician best known for his work on finite groups. He was a leading figure in the completion of the classification of finite simple groups in the 1970s and 1980s. It later turne ...
) and became a fellow of the
American Mathematical Society
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...
. In 2017 he gave the
Łojasiewicz Lecture (on the "Some models of segregation ") at the
Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
In 2018 he was named a
SIAM Fellow
The SIAM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognizes outstanding members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The goal of the program is to:
*honor SIAM members who are recognized by their peers as distinguished ...
and he received the
Shaw Prize
The Shaw Prize is an annual award presented by the Shaw Prize Foundation. Established in 2002 in Hong Kong, it honours "individuals who are currently active in their respective fields and who have recently achieved distinguished and signifi ...
in Mathematics.
Shaw Prize 2018
/ref>
Bibliography
In addition to over two hundred articles in refereed academic journals, Caffarelli has coauthored two books:
#''Fully Nonlinear Elliptic Equations'' by Luis Caffarelli and Xavier Cabré (1995), American Mathematical Society.
#''A Geometric Approach to Free Boundary Problems'' by Luis Caffarelli and Sandro Salsa (2005), American Mathematical Society.
References
External links
*
Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Caffarelli, Luis
1948 births
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
Argentine mathematicians
Living people
Mathematical analysts
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences faculty
People from Buenos Aires
Rolf Schock Prize laureates
University of Chicago faculty
University of Minnesota faculty
University of Texas at Austin faculty
Institute for Advanced Study faculty
PDE theorists
Wolf Prize in Mathematics laureates
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics