Dear Hyunju, dear Vice President in absentia, dear family and friends, ladies and gentlemen,
It is my pleasure to welcome you to Hyunju Kwon's inaugural lecture and to introduce her to you.
Hyunju Kwon was born in the city of Ulsan in South Korea in 1991. She developed a passion for mathematics at an early age through well done outreach books on mathematics. She did her Bachelor in Mathematics at Seoul's Sungkyunkwan University, where her interest in one of the languages of nature, namely partial differential equations, started to unfold. At the University of British Columbia, she completed her PhD thesis, supervised by Dong Li and Tai-Peng Tsai, in 2019 on the "Existence and ill-posedness for fluid PDEs with rough data".
Hyunju's work is related to one of the seven Millenium Problems, namely
global existence and smoothness for the Navier-Stokes equation, which governs flowing substances under viscosity, in dimension three. In this fascinating area real world experimental insight on all sorts of turbulence meet with deep analysis of non-linear partial differential equations and their statistical descriptions initiated, e.g., by Andrei Kolmogorov back in 1941. Certain of those phenomenological descriptions lead to Onsager conjectures, which constitute a highly active area of research until now with quite some Zurich flavour.
After her PhD Hyunju Kwon moved towards the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton with her research concentrating on turbulent flows. In 2022, she joined ETH Zurich as a Hermann Weyl Instructor mentored by our colleague Alessio Figalli. In this period, Hyunju Kwon managed – together with Vikram Giri and Matthew Novack – to prove the L3 based strong Onsager conjecture. The authors constructed solutions to equations governing fluid dynamics by leveraging real world features of turbulent flows against subtle non-linear analysis. In their words: "Our main theorem states that there exist weak solutions which dissipate the total kinetic energy, satisfy the local energy inequality ... " and belong to certain space. En passant, they also developed a Nash iteration where it is key to switch from the original Fourier techniques to wavelets.
We are very happy that Hyunju Kwon has accepted our offer without any turbulences and joined the D-MATH as Tenure Track Assistant Professor in 2024. We are looking forward to her inaugural lecture.