Abbas Bahri (1 January 1955 – 10 January 2016) was a Tunisian mathematician.
He was the winner of the
Fermat Prize and the Langevin Prize in mathematics.
He was a professor of mathematics at
Rutgers University
Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and wa ...
.
He mainly studied the
calculus of variations
The calculus of variations (or Variational Calculus) is a field of mathematical analysis that uses variations, which are small changes in functions
and functionals, to find maxima and minima of functionals: mappings from a set of functions t ...
,
partial differential equation
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 ...
s, and
differential geometry. He introduced the method of the critical points at infinity, which is a fundamental step in the calculus of variations.
Biography
Bahri received his secondary education in Tunisia and higher education in France. He attended the École Normale Superieure in Paris
in 1974, the first Tunisian to do so.
In 1981, he completed his PhD from
Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University.
His dissertation advisor was the French mathematician
Haïm Brezis. Afterwards, he was a visiting scientist at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
.
In October 1981, Bahri became a lecturer in mathematics at the
University of Tunis. He taught as a lecturer at the
École Polytechnique
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
The Seine ( , ) is a river in northern Franc ...
from 1984 to 1993. In 1988, he became a tenured professor at Rutgers University. At Rutgers, he was director of the Center for Nonlinear Analysis from 1988 to 2002.
Personal life
He married Diana Nunziante on 20 June 1991. His wife is from
Italy
Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
and they had four children.
On 10 January 2016, he died following a long illness at the age of 61.
Awards
In 1989, Bahri won the Fermat Prize for Mathematics, jointly with
Kenneth Alan Ribet, for his introduction of new methods in the calculus of variations.
Works
* ''Pseudo-orbits of contact forms'' (1988)
* ''Critical Points at Infinity in Some Variational Problems'' (1989)
* ''Classical and Quantic Periodic Motions of Multiply Polarized Spin-Particles'' (1998)
* ''Flow lines and algebraic invariants in contact form geometry'' (2003)
* ''Recent progress in conformal geometry'' with Yongzhong Xu (2007)
Selected publications
*
*
References
External links
Official Rutgers website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bahri, Abbas
Rutgers University faculty
1955 births
2016 deaths
Tunisian mathematicians
Variational analysts
Pierre and Marie Curie University alumni
People from Tunis