Kari Astala (born 26 July 1953 in

Helsinki Helsinki () is the Capital city, capital and most populous List of cities and towns in Finland, city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About people live in the municipali ...

) is a Finnish mathematician, specializing in analysis. Astala graduated from the

University of Helsinki The University of Helsinki (, ; UH) is a public university in Helsinki, Finland. The university was founded in Turku in 1640 as the Royal Academy of Åbo under the Swedish Empire, and moved to Helsinki in 1828 under the sponsorship of Alexander ...

with M.Sc. in 1977 and received his doctorate there in 1980 with thesis ''On Measures of compactness and ideal variations in Banach spaces''. In the 1980s and 1990s he held academic appointments at the

and the Academy of Finland. He was a full professor at the

University of Jyväskylä A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". U ...

from 1995 to 2002, a full professor at the University of Helsinki from 2002 to 2017, and an Academy Professor from 2006 to 2011 at the Academy of Finland. Since 2017 he is an adjunct professor at

Aalto University Aalto University (; ) is a public university, public research university located in Espoo, Finland. It was established in 2010 as a merger of three major Finnish universities: the Helsinki University of Technology, the Helsinki School of Economic ...

. In 1994 he received the Salem Prize for solving the conjecture of Frederick Gehring and Edgar Reich (1927–2009) in the theory of quasiconformal mappings, applying the theory of dynamical systems. In 2003 he was involved in the solution of Alberto Calderón's inverse problem, which has application in electrical impedance tomography. He collaborated on several papers with Frederick Gehring. In 2000 Astala was Gehring Visiting Professor at the

University of Michigan The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...

. He has been on research visits at MSRI, the Mittag-Leffler Institute, the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

, and a number of other institutions. He was an Invited Speaker with talk ''Analytical aspects of quasiconformality'' at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the IMU Abacus Medal (known before ...

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

in 1998 and at the European Congress of Mathematicians in 1996 in Budapest and in 2012 in Kraków. In 2003 he was awarded the Magnus Ehrnrooth Foundation Prize and in 2011 the Finnish Cultural Foundation Prize. From 2002 to 2006 he was President of the Finnish Mathematical Society. In 1997 he became a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.

Selected publications

* *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Astala, Kari 20th-century Finnish mathematicians University of Helsinki alumni University of Jyväskylä alumni Academic staff of the University of Helsinki Academic staff of Aalto University Members of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters 1953 births Living people 21st-century Finnish mathematicians