Speaker: Alessio Figalli - Fields Medal Laureate
Teams link
Registration:
https://forms.office.com/r/hmPJ7UcWp3 (for UNNC staff and students)
https://forms.office.com/r/HL3TuRZk9Y (for non-UNNC participants)
Agenda:
3:30 pm - 3:50 pm: Speech of Professor Behrouz Emamizadeh, Head of the Department
3:55 pm - 4:00 pm: Introduction to the speaker
4:00 pm - 4:45 pm: Talk of Professor Alessio Figalli
4:45 pm - 5:00 pm: Questions and answers
Abstract:
These notes record and expand the lectures for the “Journées Equations aux Dérivées Partielles 2018” held during the week of June 11-15, 2018. The aim is to give an overview of the classical theory for the obstacle problem, and then present some recent developments on the regularity of the free boundary.
Biography:
Alessio Figalli is an Italian mathematician working at ETH Zurich who received the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 2018.
In 2006, he graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (SNS) and the University of Pisa where his dissertation on optimal transportation on non-compact manifolds was supervised by Luigi Ambrosio, who is now Director of the SNS. From his first year in 2002, Alessio surprised students and staff of the school with his vivid interest in mathematics and his ability to attend and understand first year modules as well as more advanced lectures which were intended for later years’ undergraduate or PhD students. In 2006, word spread of a student applying for the PhD programme with already two papers submitted for publication, an extremely rare achievement for an undergraduate student of Mathematics.
In October 2007, Alessio obtained a PhD from both the Scuola Normale of Pisa and the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon under the joint supervision of Luigi Ambrosio and Cedric Villani with Optimal Transportation and action-minimizing measures being the title of his thesis. Alessio spent two years in France, first as a researcher of the European research centre CNRS, and then as Professor at the École Polytechnique. In 2009, he moved from Europe to the United States of America, seizing the opportunity of working with Luis Caffarelli at the University of Texas in Austin (UTA). In the next seven years, Alessio did not just reach the highest professor rank at UTA, but also his paper titled A mass transportation approach to quantitative isoperimetric inequalities (with Aldo Pratelli and Francesco Maggi) appeared in 2011 in the prestigious journal Inventiones Mathematicae. In 2016, Figalli moved back to Europe where he took up the position of Chaired Professor at ETH Zurich, before being appointed in 2019 as Director of the Forschungsinstitut für Mathematik (Institute for Mathematical Research - FIM).
The research interests of Alessio Figalli include calculus of variations and partial differential equations (PDEs), with particular emphasis on optimal transportation, Monge-Ampère equations, functional and geometric inequalities, elliptic PDEs of local and non-local type, free boundary problems, Hamilton-Jacobi equations, transport equations with rough vector-fields, and random matrix theory. Up to now, he has published 164 research papers, written with more than fifty research collaborators, and his number of citations exceeds 3000.
During his career Alessio Figalli has received many awards, including the notable European Mathematical Society (EMS) Prize in 2012, and the Stampacchia Gold Medal in 2015. In the ICM of Rio de Janeiro in 2018, he received the Fields Medal, the most important prize in Mathematics, which is often compared to the Nobel Prize. The Fields medal is awarded only once every four years, and Alessio Figalli is the second Italian awardee, 44 years after Enrico Bombieri.
Alessio Figalli has received other honours and titles including the Knighthood of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic which was awarded directly from the President of Italy. Moreover:
- One of the asteroids orbiting the Sun (438253) has been named after Alessio Figalli.
- In November 2019, the character of Phil Gallis, a mathematician who helps Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck in the riddle of the Four Dimensional Corkscrew in Topolino (Mickey Mouse),was based on Alessio Figalli.
Other links
Contact info: Daniele.Garrisi@nottingham.edu.cn