“We mathematicians begin our careers following the paths of those who have contributed to the most important scientific advances, so I hope I can leave an important trail of inspiration for those who come after me,” he told yesterday. the day the Argentine Luis Caffarelli (Buenos Aires, 1948), the first Latin American to be recognized with the Abel Prize, considered the Nobel Prize in mathematics.
Overwhelmed but happy by the requests for interviews after the ruling of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters was announced this Wednesday, the winner mentioned that both he and his family and friends were pleased that the Argentine press called him “the Messi of the mathematics”, because “what makes all of this incredible is that I have really enjoyed every moment of my career.
“I feel very honored by the Abel Prize selection committee and the unwavering support of my collaborators throughout my 50 years of work. My formidable collaborators always provided a nurturing environment that stimulated joint thinking.”
Caffarelli, who works as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is the world’s leading expert on free boundary problems for differential equations in nonlinear partial derivatives, topics that allow describing phenomena as diverse as the flow of water or the growth of populations.
He reiterated that mathematics has been for him, during his almost half a century of academic work, “a constant source of joy and inspiration.”
The contributions of the Buenos Aires researcher are a “high level” example of how to apply mathematics to an infinite number of problems, including financial and social ones, that go beyond the purely abstract field of numbers, celebrated Mexican colleagues.
Caffarelli studied at the University of Buenos Aires. At the age of 20, he already had a degree in mathematics from the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences and at the same time he had completed almost half of the subjects of the physics degree; he finally decided on the first of his passions, but without stopping thinking about the second. That is why, in his opinion, “mathematics linked to physics are the most interesting.”
Behavior of the physical world
The Abel Prize was awarded to him “for his ingenious new techniques that contribute to the understanding of partial linear equations,” those tools that scientists use to predict the behavior of the physical world.
A committee made up of five renowned mathematicians from various countries chose the Argentine, a naturalized American, for his “fundamental contributions to the theory of the regularity of nonlinear partial differential equations, including free boundary problems and the Monge-Ampère equation.” .
In a statement, the Norwegian academy stressed that the mathematician “has given evidence of brilliant geometric knowledge and has provided many fundamental results. Over a period of more than 40 years he has made innovative contributions to the theory of regularity.
The chairman of the Abel Prize Committee, Helge Holden, explained that Caffarelli’s theorems “have radically changed our understanding of classes of nonlinear partial differential equations with wide applications. His results are technically virtuoso and cover many different areas of mathematics and its applications. Few living mathematicians have contributed so much.
Dr. Caffarelli has always stated “that he is not very much in favor of doing super-abstract investigations that only half a dozen mathematicians can understand; that is why his contributions are a high-level example of how to apply mathematics. His award is great news for his colleagues in Latin America, not only because of his fundamental contributions to mathematical theories, but precisely because of the applications that have been achieved with his work. The news excites us as it happened years ago with the Fields Prize (to mathematicians under 40 years of age) awarded to the Brazilian Artur Avila, a former Olympian ”, he indicated to the day Dr. Rogelio Valdez Delgado, president of the organizing committee of the Mexican Mathematical Olympiad.
Gamaliel Ble, a researcher at the Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco, agreed that the Abel prize for his colleague is a celebration in Latin America “because it shows that research groups have been consolidating in the region. It is very important that in the Latin American sphere we begin to recognize that mathematics can make great contributions to society. In recent years we have precisely shown that tools such as differential equations are very useful for modeling processes that progress in time, we saw this now with the pandemic, when mathematical models gave projections of what was going to happen”.
The Abel Prize is awarded by the King of Norway. It was created in 2002 in honor of the mathematician from that country Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829) to compensate for the absence of a distinction in the Nobel prizes for the most outstanding exponents in mathematics on the international scene. It is endowed with 676 thousand 500 euros that will be delivered to Caffarelli in Oslo on May 23.
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