Person: Lions (2), Pierre-Louis
Pierre-Louis Lions is a French mathematician best known for his work on partial differential equations and the calculus of variations.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Grasse is not very far from Draguignan where Alain Connes, who won a Fields Medal 12 years before Lions won his Fields Medal, was born.
- Lions studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1975 to 1979.
- From 1979 to 1981 Lions held a research post at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.
- Lions has made some of the most important contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations through the 1980s and 1990s.
- Pierre-Louis Lions is unique in his unbelievable ability to transcend these boundaries and to solve pressing problems throughout the field.
- The method was first introduced by Lions in joint work with M G Crandall in 1983 in which they studied Hamilton-Jacobi equations.
- Lions and Crandall at last broke open the problem by focusing attention on viscosity solutions, which are defined in terms of certain inequalities holding wherever the graph of the solution is touched on one side or the other by a smooth test function.
- Another equally innovative piece of work by Lions was his work on the Boltzmann equation and other kinetic equations.
- In 1989 Lions, in joint work with DiPerma, was the first to give a rigorous solution with arbitrary initial data.
- Another major contribution by Lions, in a long series of important papers, is to variational problems.
- Lions's clever idea was to introduce "concentration compactness" techniques which look at energy concentrations and so avoid problems which occur when examining the minimising sequences without compactness.
- Lions has received many awards for his outstanding contributions to mathematics.
- In addition to the Paris Academy, Lions has been elected a member of the Naples Academy and the European Academy.
- Lions was awarded the Prix Thomson (2004) and, on behalf of his team, the Prix Institut de Finance Europlace (2003).
- Lions lists his hobbies as cinema and reading, and his favourite sports as rugby and swimming.
Born 11 August 1956, Grasse, Alpes-Maritimes, France.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Prize Fields Medal
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
