Sylvie Benzoni-Gavage (born 1967) is a French mathematician known for her research in partial differential equations, fluid dynamics,

traffic flow In mathematics and transportation engineering, traffic flow is the study of interactions between travellers (including pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and their vehicles) and infrastructure (including highways, signage, and traffic control dev ...

shock wave In physics, a shock wave (also spelled shockwave), or shock, is a type of propagating disturbance that moves faster than the local speed of sound in the medium. Like an ordinary wave, a shock wave carries energy and can propagate through a me ...

s, and

phase transition In chemistry, thermodynamics, and other related fields, a phase transition (or phase change) is the physical process of transition between one state of a medium and another. Commonly the term is used to refer to changes among the basic states o ...

s. In 2017 she was named as the director of the

Institut Henri Poincaré The Henri Poincaré Institute (or IHP for ''Institut Henri Poincaré'') is a mathematics research institute part of Sorbonne University, in association with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). It is located in the 5th arrond ...

Education and career

Benzoni was a student at the

École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud 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, Sav ...

. She completed her Ph.D. in 1991 at the

Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 (french: link=no, Université Claude-Bernard Lyon 1, UCBL) is one of the three public universities of Lyon, France. It is named after the French physiologist Claude Bernard and specialises in science and technol ...

; her dissertation, supervised by

Denis Serre Denis Serre (born 1 November 1954) is a French mathematician who works as a professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, where he has chaired the mathematics department since 2012.

, was ''Analyse numerique des modeles hydrodynamiques d'ecoulements diphasiques instationnaires dans les reseaux de production petroliere''. She became a researcher at CNRS in 1992, and in 2003 became a professor at Claude Bernard University. After five years as assistant director at the in Lyon, she became director there in 2016.

Contributions

With her advisor Denis Serre, Benzoni is the author of ''Multi-dimensional Hyperbolic Partial Differential Equations: First-Order Systems and Applications'' (Oxford University Press, 2007) and the editor of ''Hyperbolic Problems: Theory, Numerics, Applications'' (Springer, 2008). She is the author of a French textbook on differential calculus and

differential equation In mathematics, a differential equation is an equation that relates one or more unknown functions and their derivatives. In applications, the functions generally represent physical quantities, the derivatives represent their rates of change, an ...

s, ''Calcul différentiel et équations différentielles: Cours et exercices corrigés'' (Dunod, 2010; 2nd ed., 2014). Benzoni is also active in communicating mathematics to the public, through her work with the

European Mathematical Society The European Mathematical Society (EMS) is a European organization dedicated to the development of mathematics in Europe. Its members are different mathematical societies in Europe, academic institutions and individual mathematicians. The current ...

, and is a supporter of open access publishing of research.

References

1967 births Living people 20th-century French mathematicians Women mathematicians French women mathematicians 21st-century French mathematicians Research directors of the French National Centre for Scientific Research {{France-mathematician-stub