Alessio Figalli wins the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics”
Alessio Figalli, Professor of Mathematics at ETH Zurich, was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Rio de Janeiro today for his outstanding contribution to mathematical research. The medal is to mathematics what the Nobel Prize is to natural sciences.
Congratulations Alessio
On 1 August 2018 our colleague Professor Alessio Figalli received the Fields Medal during the opening ceremony of ICM 2018 in Rio de Janeiro. He became the first member of our department to be given the most prestigious award of our profession.
Alessio has made numerous seminal contributions to the broad area of Calculus of Variations and Partial Differential Equations. An important focus of his research has been the optimal transport problem to find the best way of transporting resources from one place to another.
Optimal transport, besides being an important challenging problem by itself, has also striking applications to many other areas of mathematics. In particular, Alessio has been able to use optimal transport techniques to understand how the shape of soap bubbles and crystals change under the influence of external forces. Also, by exploiting the principle that many physical phenomena evolve in time trying to minimize the total kinetic energy, he has obtained new results on the Monge-Ampere equation that allowed him to prove global existence of solutions to the semi-geostrophic equations, a model used in meteorology to study large scale atmospheric flows.
More recently, he has both introduced and developed new transportation techniques to prove universality results in certain random matrix models. Furthermore, on a completely different direction, he has recently developed a new approach to study the structure of interfaces in phase transitions, for instance ice melting to water.
Congratulations Alessio for this monumental achievement.
Mete Soner
Chair, Department of Mathematics