Recipients
2023: Isabelle Gallagher
Born in 1973 in Cagnes-sur-Mer, Isabelle Gallagher studied at the École Polytechnique from 1992 to 1995 before joining the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, where she obtained a diplôme d'études approfondies (DEA) in 1996 and a doctorate in 1998, working under the supervision of Jean-Yves Chemin on the dynamics of fluids. After that she was Chargée de Recherches of the CNRS at the University of Paris-Sud and the École Polytechnique and habilitated in 2002 at the Université Paris-Sud. From 2004, she was a professor at the Université Paris-Diderot and from 2003 to 2009, she also taught at the École Polytechnique. Since 2017 she is a Professor in Mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, where she directed the Department of Mathematics and Applications from 2018 to 2019. Since 2019, she is the director of the Foundation Sciences Mathématiques in Paris.
Isabelle Gallagher has received numerous awards, including the Prix Paul Doistau–Émile Blutet and the Prix Sophie Germain of the French Academy of Sciences and the Silver Medal of the CNRS. In 2014 she was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians. From 2012 to 2016 she was a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the ESI.
Professor Gallagher is honored for her numerous innovative and highly significant contributions to the mathematical theory of fluid dynamics. With rigorous mathematical analysis she has greatly advanced our understanding of the relationships between microscopic and macroscopic models of fluid. In particular, her work explains how the Boltzmann equation, which gives a statistical description of a gas, emerges from an atomic-level model of the gas as a vast collection of interacting particles moving and colliding according to Newton's laws.
More about Isabelle Gallagher's work
Webpage of Prof. Gallagher:
2022: Martin Hairer
Martin Hairer, born in 1975, obtained a BSc in Mathematics and a MSc and PhD in Physics (2001) from the University of Geneva. He was Postdoctoral Fellow, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Full Professor, and Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick (2002–2017). He was Associate Professor at New York University (Courant Institute) in 2009. Since 2017 he is Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics of Imperial College London. His research focuses on stochastic analysis, in particular stochastic partial differential equations. He received the Whitehead Prize (2008), the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2008), the Fermat Prize (2013), the Fröhlich Prize (2014), the Fields Medal (2014), and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics (2021).
Professor Hairer is honored for his groundbreaking work on stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). Physicists and mathematicians use SPDEs to describe physical systems which evolve in an environment permeated by randomness. However, for the modeling of some fundamental physical phenomena such as random interface growth, the mathematical tools developed over the past several centuries are insufficient to make sense of these singular, nonlinear, noise-driven equations, much less to solve them. In a remarkable breakthrough, Hairer's theory of regularity structures overcomes this barrier. It provides a powerful and coherent toolbox, which has already enabled the solution of several important SPDEs by him and his coauthors and which opens a pathway to new discoveries.
More about Martin Hairer's work
Webpage of Prof. Hairer:
2021: Elliott Lieb
Elliott Hershel Lieb, born in 1932, obtained his B.S. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1953 until 1956 he studied at the University of Birmingham in England for his Ph.D. Back in the US he held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Illinois and at Cornell University and a permanent position at IBM. He then moved on to Yeshiva University in New York, Northeastern University in Boston and to MIT again. In 1975 he became a full Professor at Princeton University.
Professor Lieb is honoured for his deep and groundbreaking mathematical analysis of fundamental problems and models of many-body physics, foremost his works of recent years, which continue to be outstanding and inspiring to a new generation of mathematical physicists. Two highlights in the realm of Coulomb systems are a mathematically rigorous justification of the Local Density Approximation in Density Functional Theory, and a proof of the equivalence in the thermodynamic limit of three different definitions of the minimum energy of a homogeneous electron gas (joint work with M. Lewin and R. Seiringer).
More about Elliott Lieb's work
Webpage of Prof. Lieb:
- http://web.math.princeton.edu/~lieb/
- https://dof.princeton.edu/about/clerk-faculty/emeritus/elliott-hershel-lieb
2020: Anton Alekseev
Anton Alekseev studied at the Leningrad State University and was trained at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in St. Petersburg where he obtained his PhD in Mathematical Physics in 1991. After research positions in Zurich and Uppsala, he became full professor for mathematics at the University of Geneva in 2001.
Alekseev has worked on a wide range of topics in mathematical physics and pure mathematics including algebra and geometry, as well as mechanics and field theory. He has made seminal contributions in these disciplines, and often his work uncovers connections and unexpected links between them.
His works on the Kashiwara-Vergne conjecture on the structure of the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula in Lie theory are groundbreaking. With E. Meinreken he obtained a proof in 2006, in further works with C. Torossian and others he uncovered surprising relations of this algebraic problem to the theory of Drinfeld associators and later also to the topology of 2-dimensional surfaces.
More about Anton Alekseev's work
Webpage of Prof. Alekseev: https://www.unige.ch/math/en/people/alekseev/