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Luigi Ambrosio

Bhargav Bhatt

For his “deep and numerous contributions to calculus of variations and geometric measure theory, and broad and far-reaching influence on these fields.”

Luigi Ambrosio received the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics for his ““deep and numerous contributions to calculus of variations and geometric measure theory, and broad and far-reaching influence on these fields.” He a professor of Mathematical Analysis at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy.

Together with his PhD advisor, Ennio De Giorgi, Ambrosio founded the theory of free discontinuity problems, a class of problems in the calculus of variations that involves the combination of volume and surface energies. In this class, it is possible to frame problems coming from image segmentation and fracture mechanics. In the second part of his career, Ambrosio moved to the theory of currents in geometric measure theory, introducing a far-reaching extension of the Federer-Fleming theory to metric spaces, and to the theory of flows associated to non-smooth vector fields. His present research interests include optimal Transport and Analysis in metric measure spaces.

Ambrosio has been plenary speaker at the International Mathematical Union (ICM) 2018 and sectional speaker at ICM 2000. His scientific production includes more than 200 papers and many famous textbooks. In his career he received several prestigious awards, including the Caccioppoli Prize in 1999, the Fermat Prize in 2003, the Balzan Prize in 2019 and the Riemann Prize in 2022.

The members of the 2024 Nemmers Prize Selection Committee were Aaron Naber, Northwestern; Joseph Silverman, Brown University; Martin Hairer, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and Imperial College London.