Luis Caffarelli

Luis Caffarelli

Luis A. Caffarelli (born December 8, 1948) is an Argentinian mathematician and leader in the field of partial differential equations and their applications.

Caffarelli obtained his Masters of Science (1968) and Ph.D. (1972) at the University of Buenos Aires. He currently holds the Sid Richardson Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He also has been a professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. From 1986 to 1996 he was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1991 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He has been awarded Doctor Honoris Causa from l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris; Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and Universidad de La Plata, Argentina. He received the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1984.

Caffarelli received great recognition with his breakthrough paper "The regularity of free boundaries in higher dimensions" published in 1977 in Acta Mathematica. Since then, he has been considered one of the world's leading experts in free boundary problems and nonlinear partial differential equations. He developed several regularity results for fully nonlinear elliptic equations including the Monge-Ampere equation. He is also famous for his contributions to homogenization. Recently, he has taken an interest in Integro-differential equations. One of his most cited and celebrated results regards the Partial regularity of suitable weak solutions of the Navier–Stokes equations, obtained in 1982 in collaboration with Louis Nirenberg and Robert V. Kohn.

In 2005, he received the prestigious Rolf Schock Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences "for his important contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations". He also received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Mathematics in 2009. In 2012 he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (jointly with Michael Aschbacher) and became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.