Funded by SMAI, SEMA and SIMAI, the CICIAM (now ICIAM) Lagrange Prize has been established to provide international recognition to individual mathematicians who have made an exceptional contribution to applied mathematics throughout their careers.
The CICIAM Lagrange Prize is awarded to Professor Jacques-Louis Lions (College de France and Academie des Sciences de Paris, France) in recognition of his exceptional contributions to applied and industrial mathematics throughout his career.
Jacques-Louis Lions is one of the most distinguished and influential scientists in the domain of applied and industrial mathematics in this century. He has made outstanding contributions in many areas and has opened large classes of new problems and methods. To give only a few examples one should mention first the systematic use of functional analysis and weak solutions for solving elliptic and parabolic differential equations, both theoretically and numerically, further the various methods he developed for solving nonlinear problems and his profound studies on control problems for systems governed by partial differential equations, optimal control first and controllability later with the introduction of the now standard Hilbert Uniqueness Method. He made essential contributions to singular perturbations and, jointly with Alain Bensoussan and Georges Papanicolaou, developed the theory and methods of homogenization. In collaboration with Roger Temam and S.H. Wang he recently wrote major articles on mathematical models of climatology and meteorology about which he presented an invited lecture at ICIAM 95 in Hamburg. Those examples are taken from more than 500 articles and 20 books. His famous book on ``Quelques methodes de resolution des problemes aux limites nonlineaires'' is still a basic reference and a source of problems thirty years after it was published. A similar statement holds for the celebrated ``Lions-Magenes'' books. The more recently published ``Dautry-Lions'' book series on ``Mathematical analysis and numerical methods for science and technology'' which covers the development of modern mathematical methods, seen from the angle of applications, up to the designing of computer programmes, has become a fundamental reference for mathematicians, physicists and engineers.
Jacques-Louis Lions has founded and developed an important school of applied mathematics in France with a strong influence in many other countries. He has participated in many industrial programmes, for example as President of the Institut de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, INRIA, and later of the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, CNES. He has been President of the International Mathematical Union, IMU, and President de l'Academie des Sciences de Paris.
Subcommittee for the ICIAM/CICIAM 1999 Lagrange Prize
- Franco Brezzi;
- Klaus Kirchgässner;
- Jean-Claude Nédélec (chair);
- Olavi Nevanlinna;
- Gilbert Strang;
- Ernie Tuck.