Profile of 2010 Chern Medal Winner Louis Nirenberg

August 24, 2010

In a recent profile in Business Standard, expositor-collaborator and winner of the 2010 Chern Medal, Louis Nirenberg, discusses his influences, his collaborations, and the global “family” of mathematicians.

During his long career, Shiing-Shen Chern (1911-2004) obtained fundamental results in major aspects of modern geometry, and founded the area of global differential geometry.

Nirenberg (New York University) credits Chern for having drawn his attention in the 1950s to a particular problem in mathematics that put Nirenberg's career into high gear: proving the integrability condition for almost complex structures.

In 1957, Nirenberg had reduced the problem to a system of non-linear PDEs (partial differential equations), such that each equation involves derivatives with respect to a single complex variable. Nirenberg's student-collaborator on the solution, August Newlander, titled his dissertation "Complex Analytic Structure for Almost Complex Manifolds Satisfying the Integrability Condition."

At the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians, in Hyderabad, India, Nirenberg became the first winner of the Chern Medal. His insights into PDEs—and his ability to link PDEs, analysis, and geometry—connects all of his mathematics.

In addition, Nirenberg likes to connect with mathematicians. In the course of nearly 60 years of mathematics, Nirenberg has had collaborators in 90% of his 185 papers.

He has guided dozens of students (who have had nearly 250 descendants), according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project. According to Business Standard, in each year of the last decade the 15 top-cited papers in mathematics have included papers by Nirenberg.

“I wrote one paper with Philip Hartman that was elementary but enormous fun to do," Nirenberg once said. "That's the thing I try to get across to people who don't know anything about mathematics: What fun it is! One of the wonders of mathematics is you go somewhere in the world and you meet other mathematicians, and it's like one big family."

And that family has expressed its gratitude by honoring Nirenberg. Read the full profile here.

Source: Business Standard (August 24, 2010)