Luis Caffarelli, who has just received the Abel Prize, is an Argentinian mathematician. Born in 1948, he continues to teach mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, in the United States.
He specializes in nonlinear partial differential equations, which he has used to describe physical phenomena, particularly fluid flow—with research on the celebrated Navier–Stokes equation, whose regularity, challenged by certain turbulent phenomena, is the subject of one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s seven Millennium Prize Problems—and the melting of ice cubes, which he has studied for more than forty years. More recently, Luis Caffarelli has turned his attention to Monge–Ampère equations, which are used to solve optimal transport problems. Here again, he has developed tools for establishing the regularity of certain solutions.
He is the first South American mathematician to receive the prize, awarded annually in honor of the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. To date, only two French mathematicians have received it: Jean-Pierre Serre in 2003, the year the prize was established, and Yves Meyer in 2017. The prize awarded to each laureate now stands at 7.5 million Norwegian kroner, or more than 660,000 euros.
