Funded by SMAI, SEMA and SIMAI, the 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 ICIAM Lagrange Prize for 2003 was awarded to Professor Enrico Magenes, Università di Pavia, for his contributions to the development of Applied Mathematics at the worldwide level.
In a remarkable series of papers, followed and made complete in a three-volume book in cooperation with J.L. Lions (Nonhomogeneous Boundary Value Problems and Applications), he set the foundations for the modern treatment of partial differential equations, and in particular the ones mostly used in applications. This includes the systematic treatment of variational formulations, as well as the paradigm ``regularity-results-transposition-interpolation,'' and allows a fully detailed use of the properties of trace spaces. The book has been the reference book for more than thirty years, for the completeness of the results reported there, but even more for the strategy of approach to problems. After that, the scientific activity of Magenes moved even further in the direction of application. In the early seventies he founded the Institute of Numerical Analysis in Pavia, which he directed for more than twenty years, keeping it in close contact with the top level scientific institutions all over the world, and making it the source of a number of highly successful scientists and of several pioneering results.
Apart from his continuous inspirational influence, he contributed personally to the development of a totally new technique for treating free boundary problems by means of variational inequalities, with remarkable applications to several important problems such as the flow of fluids through porous media or the phase-change phenomena. But even if his own results have been of paramount importance, his major merit is surely in the impulse he gave, and the influence he had in starting, encouraging and sustaining a way of doing mathematics that joined the rigour, the elegance and the deepness of so-called pure mathematics with the real-life problems that have to be faced in applications. If the combination of pure mathematics and applications is what Applied Mathematics is nowadays, Magenes is surely among the ones that deserve most credit.
Subcommittee for the 2003 ICIAM Lagrange Prize
- Franco Brezzi (chair);
- Martin Bendsøe;
- Gerard Iooss;
- Rupert Klein;
- Eitan Tadmor.
Professor Franco Brezzi accepted the prize on behalf of Enrico Magenes.