Athanassios Spyridon Fokas (; born 30 June 1952) is a

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–based

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academic, educator and scientist, with degrees in Aeronautical Engineering and Medicine. Since 2002, he is Professor of Nonlinear Mathematical Science in the

Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Department may refer to: * Departmentalization, division of a larger organization into parts with specific responsibility Government and military *Department (administrative division), a geographical and administrative division within a country, ...

(DAMTP) at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

Education

Fokas earned a BS in

Aeronautics Aeronautics is the science or art involved with the study, design process, design, and manufacturing of air flight-capable machines, and the techniques of operating aircraft and rockets within the atmosphere. While the term originally referred ...

from

Imperial College Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a cultural district in South Kensington that included museums ...

in 1975 and a PhD in

Applied mathematics Applied mathematics is the application of mathematics, mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and Industrial sector, industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a ...

from

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private university, private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small g ...

in 1979. His dissertation, ''Invariants, Lie-Backlund Operators and Backlund Transformations'', was written under the direction of Paco Axel Lagerstrom. He subsequently attended the

Miller School of Medicine The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, officially Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, is the University of Miami's graduate medical school in Miami, Florida. Founded in 1952, it is the oldest medical school in the state of Florida. ...

at the

University of Miami The University of Miami (UM, UMiami, Miami, U of M, and The U) is a private university, private research university in Coral Gables, Florida, United States. , the university enrolled 19,852 students in two colleges and ten schools across over ...

, earning his medical degree in 1986.

Career

After medical school, Fokas was appointed Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at

Clarkson University Clarkson University is a private research university with its main campus in Potsdam, New York. Clarkson has additional graduate programs and research facilities in the New York Capital District. It was established in 1896 and enrolled over 4 ...

in 1986. From there, he moved to

in 1996 to a Chair of Applied Mathematics. Since 2002, he holds the Professorship of Nonlinear Mathematical Science (2000) in the

at the University of Cambridge, a professorship established in the year 2000 for a single tenure. He was elected a Member of the Academy of Athens in 2004 and a professorial fellow of

Clare Hall, Cambridge Clare Hall is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1966 by Clare College, Clare Hall is a college for advanced study, admitting only postgraduate students alongside postdoctoral researchers and fellows. It was est ...

in 2005.

Research contributions

Fokas has written about symmetries, integrable nonlinear PDEs, Painleve equations and random matrices, models for leukemia and protein folding, electro-magneto-enchephalography, nuclear imaging, and relativistic gravity. Also, he has introduced a new method for solving boundary value problems known as the Fokas method. I. M. Gelfand, a mathematician, who has also written about biology, in the citation for the Aristeion prize, wrote ''Fokas is now a very rare example of a scientist in the style of the Renaissance".

Awards

Fokas received the Naylor Prize from the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's Learned society, learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh ...

in 2000. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009). He was awarded a Blaise Pascal Medal and elected to the Mathematics section of

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...

in 2023. He was elected as 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 the 2024 class of fellows.

Personal

Fokas is married to Regina Karousou-Fokas with whom he has two children, Anastasia and Ioanna. He also has a son, Alexander, from his first marriage to Allison Pearce.

Books

* M J Ablowitz and A S Fokas, ''Complex Variables: Introduction and Applications'', Cambridge University Press, second edition (2003) * A S Fokas, A R Its, A A Kapaev and V Yu Novokshenov, ''Painlevé Transcendents: A Riemann-Hilbert Approach'', AMS (2006) * A S Fokas, '' A Unified Approach to Boundary Value Problems '', CBMS-SIAM (2008) * A S Fokas and B. Pelloni, eds, Unified Transform for Boundary Value Problems: Applications and advances, SIAM (2015).

References

External links

Home Page at Cambridge University
*
ISI Highly Cited Researchers - AS Fokas
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fokas, Athanassios 1952 births Living people Academics of Imperial College London 20th-century British mathematicians 21st-century British mathematicians 21st-century Greek mathematicians Alumni of Imperial College London California Institute of Technology alumni Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine alumni Clarkson University faculty Fellows of Clare Hall, Cambridge Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Commanders of the Order of the Phoenix (Greece) People from Argostoli