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, ...

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 research university in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Established in 1821, it is the premier institution of higher learning in the country and one of the most presti ...

. 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 land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

, 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 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, th ...

. 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 schola ...

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 jou ...

''. Since then, he has been considered one of the world's leading experts in free boundary problems and

nonlinear partial differential equation In mathematics and physics, a nonlinear partial differential equation is a partial differential equation with nonlinear terms. They describe many different physical systems, ranging from gravitation to fluid dynamics, and have been used in mathem ...

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 transformatio ...

. 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 deriva ...

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 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 Nat ...

. 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, S ...

, 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 c ...

; Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and

Universidad de La Plata The La Plata National University ( es, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, UNLP) is one of the most important Argentine national universities and the biggest one situated in the city of La Plata, capital of Buenos Aires Province. It has over 9 ...

, 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 analys ...

. 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 of the

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences ( sv, Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien) is one of the royal academies of Sweden. Founded on 2 June 1739, it is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization that takes special responsibility for prom ...

"for his important contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations". He also received the Leroy P. Steele Prize 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 turn ...

) 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, meeting ...

. 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 distinguishe ...

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

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{{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