Annalisa Buffa and Maria Colombo are invited speakers at the 2026 ICM

TheInternational Congress of Mathematicians, the largest conference in mathematics, was founded in the 1890s and was inspired by an idea of the German mathematicians Felix Klein and Georg Cantor. The first ICM was held in Zürich in 1897 and has since been held every four years. The Fields Medals and other prestigious awards are presented at the ICM's opening ceremony.

Professor Annalisa Buffa holds the Chair of Numerical Modelling and Simulation, and serves as Associate Vice President for Research. She is a world-renowned expert and highly cited researcher in numerical analysis of partial differential equations, with contributions spanning computational mechanics, electromagnetics, and approximation theory. Annalisa Buffa is a member of several prestigious academies, including the Accademia dei Lincei, the French Academy of Sciences, and Academia Europaea. She has received major distinctions, including two ERC grants (2008, 2016), the Collatz Prize (ICIAM 2015), and she was the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecturer at ICIAM 2023. In 2014, she was also an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians.

Professor Maria Colombo holds the Chair of Mathematical Analysis, Calculus of Variations and Partial Differential Equations. She made groundbreaking contributions to fluid dynamics, particularly by constructing the first non-unique Leray-Hopf solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations, challenging classical understanding of fluid models. Her research spans fundamental problems in partial differential equations including turbulence theory (Euler and Navier-Stokes equations). Maria Colombo received several awards, including the 2024 EMS Prize, a 2024 Frontiers of Science award, the 2023 ICIAM Collatz Prize, the 2023 De Giorgi Prize, the 2022 Lax Award, and an ERC Starting Grant in 2022.