1. Kansas State University
  2. »Division of Communications and Marketing
  3. »K-State Today
  4. »Mathematics department hosts NSF-CBMS conference beginning June 17, features internationally...

K-State Today

June 13, 2013

Mathematics department hosts NSF-CBMS conference beginning June 17, features internationally recognized mathematician

Submitted by Virginia Naibo

From June 17-21, the department of mathematics will host a regional research conference of the National Science Foundation Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences, or NSF-CBMS. The conference, "The Global Behavior of Solutions to Critical Nonlinear Wave Equations," features Professor Carlos Kenig from the University of Chicago as the principal speaker.

The main topic of the lectures will be about issues of local and global well-posedness, scattering, finite-time blow-up and soliton resolution for a class of nonlinear dispersive equations — namely the focusing, energy-critical nonlinear wave equation and the related energy-critical co-rotational wave maps into the sphere.

In addition to Kenig's 10 lectures, invited talks will be delivered by other experts in the field: Ioan Bejenaru from the University of California, San Diego; Thomas Duyckaerts from the Université Paris 13; Justin Holmer from Brown University; Andrea Nahmod from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Nataša Pavlović from the University of Texas at Austin; Gustavo Ponce from the University of California, Santa Barbara; Gigliola Staffilani from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Luis Vega from the Universidad del País Vasco.

The conference is supported by NSF grant DMS 1240744. More information is available on the math department website.


About the main lecturer:

Professor Carlos Kenig earned his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1978 under the direction of Alberto Calderón. From 1978 to 1980 he was an instructor at Princeton University, after which he held positions at the University of Minnesota, becoming professor in 1983. In 1985, he returned to the University of Chicago, where he now is the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor.

Kenig is an internationally renowned expert in the areas of partial differential equations and harmonic analysis. His research interests include boundary value problems under minimal regularity conditions, degenerate diffusions, free boundary problems, inverse problems and nonlinear dispersive equations. Kenig has co-authored more than 240 research articles that have been published in prestigious mathematical journals. According to MathSciNet, his work has been cited 5,470 times.

Kenig has received numerous honors since early in his carrier, including the following: Alfred Sloan Research Fellow from 1981-1983, the Salem Prize in 1984, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, an Invited Speaker ICM in 1986 and 2002, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2002, the AMS Bôcher Prize in 2008, Plenary Speaker ICM in 2010, a Foreign Member of the Istituto Lombardo, and Accademia di Scienze e Lettere since 2010.

Kenig also has made exceptional contributions to the development of human resources in the mathematical sciences. He has advised 30 graduate students, has mentored 29 postdoctoral scholars and he has collaborated with countless mathematicians all over the world.