BCAM collaborator Carlos Kenig new head of the International Mathematical Union (IMU)

• Kenig was appointed president for the period 2019-2022 during the IMU General Assembly in Sao Paolo, Brazil

The International Mathematical Union has elected mathematician Carlos Kenig as its president for the next four years (2019-2022). The election took place at the IMU General Assembly in São Paolo (Brazil) last Monday, during the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM2018).

Kenig, together with G. Ponce from the University of California at Santa Barbara, has been a long-time collaborator of BCAM’s Scientific Director, Luis Vega, and he has visited the center to work with the Linear and Non-linear waves research line on Vega’s ERC project, HADE (Harmonic Analysis and Differential Equations: new challenges).  

Carlos Kenig is known for his applications of tools and techniques of harmonic analysis to a number of different areas of partial differential equations. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1953. He obtained his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1978. After being an instructor at Princeton University and a professor at the University of Minnesota, Kenig returned to the University of Chicago in 1985, where he is currently a Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Mathematics. The collaboration with Luis Vega started in 1988 when Vega was hired as L. E. Dickson Instructor at UC. At that time Ponce was Assistant Professor in the same university. Since then, they have written almost 50 papers together.

Kenig was awarded the Salem Prize in 1984 and the Bocher Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 2008. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1986 and 2002 and a plenary speaker in 2010. Kenig is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Mathematical Society. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a vice-president elect of the American Mathematical Society. In 2016 he was elected Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

On behalf of the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics, we want to extend our sincerest congratulations on this achievement to Professor Kenig.