Fellow awarded prestigious prize by the American Mathematical Society

A Fellow of St Catharine’s has been announced as one of the winners of the 2023 Bôcher Memorial Prize by the American Mathematical Society. Professor Pierre Raphaël (2019) receives the prize in its centenary year, as it has been awarded for notable research work in analysis since 1923, when it was established in memory of mathematician Maxime Bôcher.

Professor Raphaël, who is the University of Cambridge’s Herchel Smith Professor of Pure Mathematics, was awarded the prize alongside Frank Merle of the Université de Cergy-Pontoise, Igor Rodnianski of Princeton University and Jérémie Szeftel of Sorbonne Université. The group will share a prize fund of $5,000.

The winners were commended by the American Mathematical Society:

 “The 2023 Bôcher Memorial Prize is awarded … for their ground-breaking work establishing the existence of blow-up solutions to the defocusing nonlinear Schrödinger equation in some supercritical regimes and to the compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations.

“This breath-taking achievement, which greatly enhances our understanding of dispersive PDEs and of fluid dynamics, is exposed in a monumental series of three articles: "On the implosion of a compressible fluid II: singularity formation," Annals of Mathematics 196 (2022); "On the implosion of a compressible fluid I: smooth self-similar inviscid profiles," Annals of Mathematics 196 (2022); and "On blow up for the energy super critical defocusing nonlinear Schrödinger equations," Inventiones Mathematicae 227 (2022).”

Reacting to news of the award, Professor Raphaël commented:

“Receiving the Bôcher Prize is an immense honour. Many of the names of those who transformed so deeply analysis in the last century belong to the list of awardees. Receiving this prize jointly with my collaborators, Frank Merle, Igor Rodnianski, and Jérémie Szeftel, is such a pleasure! The work recognized by the committee is the accomplishment of two decades of intense collaboration. This long journey started with the breakthrough work by Miguel Herrero and Juan Velasquez (1994) on singularity formation for super critical parabolic problems, and has constantly been influenced by our interaction with Yvan Martel and Hatem Zaag, whose works on singularity formation started nothing but a revolution.”

The 2023 prize was officially awarded during the Joint Prize Session at the 2023 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston earlier this month.

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