Sergiu Klainerman (born May 13, 1950) is a

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, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

known for his contributions to the study of

hyperbolic differential equation In mathematics, a hyperbolic partial differential equation of order n is a partial differential equation (PDE) that, roughly speaking, has a well-posed initial value problem for the first n-1 derivatives. More precisely, the Cauchy problem can be ...

s and

general relativity General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics. ...

. He is currently the

Eugene Higgins Eugene Higgins (1860 – 1948) was the rich heir to a carpet-making business, known as a ''bon vivant'', sportsman, and philanthropist. A bachelor, when he died in 1948, his estate went to establish the Higgins Trust, at that time, the eleventh la ...

Professor of Mathematics at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

, where he has been teaching since 1987.

Biography

He was born in 1950 in

Bucharest Bucharest ( , ; ro, București ) is the capital and largest city of Romania, as well as its cultural, industrial, and financial centre. It is located in the southeast of the country, on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, less than north ...

Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, a ...

, into a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

family. After attending the Petru Groza High School, he studied mathematics at the

University of Bucharest The University of Bucharest ( ro, Universitatea din București), commonly known after its abbreviation UB in Romania, is a public university founded in its current form on by a decree of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza to convert the former Princ ...

from 1969 to 1974. For graduate studies he went to

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, ...

, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1978. His thesis, written under the direction of

Fritz John Fritz John (14 June 1910 – 10 February 1994) was a German-born mathematician specialising in partial differential equations and ill-posed problems. His early work was on the Radon transform and he is remembered for John's equation. He was a ...

and

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 ...

, was titled ''Global Existence for Nonlinear Wave Equations''. From 1978 to 1980 Klainerman was a

Miller Research Fellow A miller is a person who operates a mill, a machine to grind a grain (for example corn or wheat) to make flour. Milling is among the oldest of human occupations. "Miller", "Milne" and other variants are common surnames, as are their equivalents ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, while from 1980 to 1987 he was a faculty member at New York University's

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 ...

, rising in rank to Professor in 1986. Klainerman is a member of the

U.S. 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 Natio ...

(elected 2005), a foreign member of the

French Academy of Sciences The French Academy of Sciences (French: ''Académie des sciences'') is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French scientific research. It was at th ...

(elected 2002) and a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, ...

(elected 1996). He was elected to the 2018 class of

fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

s 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 ...

. He was named a

MacArthur Fellow The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 ind ...

in 1991 and

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 1997. Klainerman was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize by the American Mathematical Society in 1999 "for his contributions to nonlinear hyperbolic equations". He is currently a co-Editor-in-Chief of

Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS ''Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS'' is a peer-reviewed mathematical journal. It is published by Springer Science+Business Media on behalf of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, with the help of the Centre National de la Recherc ...

.Editorial Board

. Accessed January 13, 2010

Major publications

* * * Klainerman, Sergiu; Majda, Andrew. ''Compressible and incompressible fluids.'' Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 35 (1982), no. 5, 629–651. * Klainerman, Sergiu. ''Global existence of small amplitude solutions to nonlinear Klein-Gordon equations in four space-time dimensions.'' Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 38 (1985), no. 5, 631–641. * Klainerman, Sergiu. ''Uniform decay estimates and the Lorentz invariance of the classical wave equation.'' Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 38 (1985), no. 3, 321–332. * Klainerman, S. ''The null condition and global existence to nonlinear wave equations.'' Nonlinear systems of partial differential equations in applied mathematics, Part 1 (Santa Fe, N.M., 1984), 293–326, Lectures in Appl. Math., 23, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 1986. * Klainerman, S.; Machedon, M. ''Space-time estimates for null forms and the local existence theorem.'' Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 46 (1993), no. 9, 1221–1268. * Klainerman, S.; Machedon, M. ''Smoothing estimates for null forms and applications.'' A celebration of John F. Nash, Jr., Duke Mathematical Journal 81 (1995), no. 1, 99–133 (1996). * Klainerman, Sergiu; Sideris, Thomas C. ''On almost global existence for nonrelativistic wave equations in 3D.'' Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 49 (1996), no. 3, 307–321.

Books

* Christodoulou, Demetrios; Klainerman, Sergiu. ''The global nonlinear stability of the Minkowski space.'' Princeton Mathematical Series, 41.

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent Academic publishing, publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, ...

, Princeton, NJ, 1993. x+514 pp. * Klainerman, Sergiu; Nicolò, Francesco. ''The evolution problem in general relativity.'' Progress in Mathematical Physics, 25. Birkhäuser Boston, Inc., Boston, MA, 2003. xiv+385 pp.

References

External links

Sergiu Klainerman personal webpage
Department of Mathematics,

{{DEFAULTSORT:Klainerman, Sergiu 1950 births Living people Scientists from Bucharest Romanian Jews University of Bucharest alumni 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 20th-century Romanian mathematicians Members of the French Academy of Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Princeton University faculty Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences alumni Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the American Mathematical Society MacArthur Fellows Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences faculty PDE theorists Jewish American scientists 21st-century Romanian mathematicians Romanian emigrants to the United States American people of Romanian-Jewish descent 21st-century American Jews