Caffarelli wins 2012 Wolf Prize

Mathematician and ICES faculty member Luis Caffarelli has been named a winner of Israel’s prestigious Wolf Prize.

Each year the Wolf Foundation awards $100,000 in up to six fields. Caffarelli received the mathematics prize.

Caffarelli is professor of mathematics and a member of the ICES Applied Mathematics Group. He holds the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents’ Chair in Mathematics No. 1.

His research interests include non-linear analysis, partial differential equations and their applications, calculus of variations, and optimization.

In a series of papers starting in 1990, Caffarelli studied viscosity solutions to non-linear partial differential equations, both the Monge–Ampère equation and the equation that models flow in a porous medium. This has proven to be an important means to arrive at the existence and uniqueness of solutions. As a result, Caffarelli has been cited as the world’s leading specialist in free-boundary problems for nonlinear partial differential equations, and a pioneer in methods tackling many classical problems that have long defied mathematicians.

With his collaborators, he has authored more than 250 scientific publications documenting this work.

Caffarelli is the second university Wolf Prize winner. He joins UT Mathematics Professor John Tate who won the 2002 Wolf Prize for mathematics.

Caffarelli shares the 2012 prize with Michael Aschbacher, professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. This year’s arts prize went to tenor Placido Domingo who became the first vocal artist to ever win the prize and he shared it with English conductor Sir Simon Rattle. Israeli physicist Jacob D. Bekenstein at Racah Institue of Physics won the physics prize. The others went to U.S.-based scientists, including chemists A. Paul Alivisatos at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Charles M. Lieber at Harvard, and in medicine, Ronald M. Evans at the Salk Institute.