Maria Colombo awarded EMS Prize
Maria Colombo. Credit: Alain Herzog (EPFL)
EPFL mathematician Maria Colombo has been awarded an EMS Prize from the European Mathematical Society.
The EMS prizes were inaugurated in 1992 by the European Mathematical Society, and are awarded every four years to up to ten recipients selected at each European Congress of Mathematics. The Prizes are presented to promising researchers under 35 years old at the time of nomination, and include a citation certificate and a €5000 cash award, half of which is given by the Foundation Compositio Mathematica, and the remaining half by the EMS Press publishing house.
Among the ten EMS Prize awardees is EPFL Professor Maria Colombo, who has received the EMS prize for “breakthrough results in fluid dynamics, optimal transport and kinetic theory, and for her impact on analysis more broadly.”
Maria Colombo holds the Chair of Mathematical Analysis, Calculus of Variations and PDEs (Partial Differential Equations) at EPFL. Her work includes several breakthroughs in the study of irregular solutions to fundamental equations in fluid dynamics, such as the Euler, transport, and Navier-Stokes equations within turbulence; the question of global regularity of solutions to the latter is one of the millennium prize problems. Colombo has shown the existence of novel classes of solutions that are singular only on a small set of times and which nevertheless exhibit wild dynamics.
In a celebrated breakthrough, Colombo has also constructed for the first time non-unique Leray-Hopf solutions of the forced Navier-Stokes equations, demonstrating the limitations of this classical class of solutions as models of the dynamics of fluids.
Beyond the equations of fluid mechanics, Colombo has established numerous seminal results in the field of optimal transport and transport equations in a low regularity regime, a class of problems arising in applications fields of mathematics ranging from PDEs and mathematical physics to geometry and probability.
Further important work of Colombo deals with the structure of singularities of solutions to the obstacle problem, the minimal surface equation, the minimizers of double phase functionals, and other elliptic variational problems.
Colombo’s work has been recognized by several prizes and awards, including the 2019 Bartolozzi Prize, the 2022 Peter Lax award, and the 2023 Collatz Prize. In 2022, she was awarded an ERC starting grant.