Awarded to Claude Bardos for his seminal contributions to nonlinear partial differential equations, kinetic theory, and mathematical fluid mechanics.
Claude Bardos was born in 1940 in Paris, where he also did his These d'Etat in 1969 at CNRS under the supervision of Jacques-Louis Lions. Since then he held professorships at several places in France but mainly in Paris, where he is now an Emeritus Professor in the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions at Université Paris Denis Diderot (Paris 7).
Claude Bardos has had a huge direct and indirect influence on generations of applied mathematicians through his seminal and inspiring work on hyperbolic partial differential equations, on kinetic equations, on many-particle limits, and on Vlasov equations. Moreover, his deep and profound research in fluid dynamics has advanced our knowledge of the Euler equations of gas dynamics, the Navier-Stokes equation, and of boundary-layer problems.
His contributions span the range from nonlinear partial differential equations, control theory, high-frequency asymptotics, to computational methods. His approach shows an excellent taste in turning physical intuition into rigorous mathematical tools. In the early 1990s, in joint work with Golse and Levermore, he used the so-called velocity-averaging lemma to show that the renormalized solutions of DiPerna and Lions for the Boltzmann equation lead to Leray-Hopf weak solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations. Another example in this spirit is given by his work of the multi-configuration time-dependent Hartree-Fock model, which uncovers deep analytical and geometrical structures that provide a new understanding of quantum mechanics and pave the way to a more efficient numerical treatment of problems in quantum chemistry.
Claude Bardos has shaped the landscape of applied mathematics over the last forty years, improving the qualitative understanding of nonlinear partial differential equations, developing novel and powerful analytical tools, and educating a new generation of mathematicians.
Subcommittee for the 2019 ICIAM Maxwell Prize
- Alexander Mielke (Weierstrass Institute, Berlin, Germany), Chair;
- Eric Cancès (Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, France);
- Karl Kunisch (Karl-Franzens Universität Graz, Austria);
- Michael Kwok-Po Ng (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China);
- Kavita Ramanan (Brown University, Providence, USA);
- Edriss Titi (Texas A&M University, USA, and Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel).