Пьер Луи Лион: Француз математигінің өмірбаяны мен ғылыми еңбектері

French mathematician (born 1956)

Pierre Louis Lions (ljɔ̃ːs; born 11 August 1956) is a French mathematician. He is known for a number of contributions to the fields of partial differential equations and the calculus of variations. He was a recipient of the 1994 Fields Medal and the 1991 Prize of the Philip Morris tobacco and cigarette company.

Lions entered the École normale supérieure in 1975, and received his doctorate from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in 1979. He holds the position of Professor of Partial differential equations and their applications at the Collège de France in Paris as well as a position at École Polytechnique. Since 2014, he has also been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. In 1979, Lions married Lila Laurenti, with whom he has one son. Lions' parents were Andrée Olivier and the renowned mathematician Jacques Louis Lions, at the time a professor at the University of Nancy, and from 1991 through 1994 the President of the International Mathematical Union.

In 1994, while working at the Paris Dauphine University, Lions received the International Mathematical Union's prestigious Fields Medal. He was cited for his contributions to viscosity solutions, the Boltzmann equation, and the calculus of variations. He has also received the French Academy of Science's Prix Paul Doistau–Émile Blutet (in 1986) and Ampère Prize (in 1992). He was an invited professor at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (2000). He is a doctor honoris causa of Heriot Watt University (Edinburgh), EPFL (2010), Narvik University College (2014), and of the City University of Hong Kong and is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.

In 1988, François Golse, Lions, Benoît Perthame, and Rémi Sentis studied the transport equation, which is a first order linear partial differential equation. They showed that if the first order coefficients are randomly chosen according to some probability distribution, then the corresponding function values are distributed with regularity which is enhanced from the original probability distribution. These results were later extended by DiPerna, Lions, and Meyer. In the physical sense, such results, known as velocity averaging lemmas, correspond to the fact that macroscopic observables have greater smoothness than their microscopic rules directly indicate. According to Cédric Villani, it is unknown if it is possible to instead use the explicit representation of solutions of the transport equation to derive these properties. The classical Picard–Lindelöf theorem deals with integral curves of Lipschitz continuous vector fields. By viewing integral curves as characteristic curves for a transport equation in multiple dimensions, Lions and Ronald DiPerna initiated the broader study of integral curves of Sobolev vector fields. DiPerna and Lions' results on the transport equation were later extended by Luigi Ambrosio to the setting of bounded variation, and by Alessio Figalli to the context of stochastic processes. DiPerna and Lions were able to prove the global existence of solutions to the Boltzmann equation. Later, by applying the methods of Fourier integral operators, Lions established estimates for the Boltzmann collision operator, thereby finding compactness results for solutions of the Boltzmann equation. As a particular application of his compactness theory, he was able to show that solutions subsequentially converge at infinite time to Maxwell distributions.

Michael Crandall and Lions introduced the notion of viscosity solution, which is a kind of generalized solution of Hamilton–Jacobi equations. Their definition is significant since they were able to establish a well posedness theory in such a generalized context. The basic theory of viscosity solutions was further worked out in collaboration with Lawrence Evans. Using a min max quantity, Lions and Jean Michel Lasry considered mollification of functions on Hilbert space which preserve analytic phenomena. Their approximations are naturally applicable to Hamilton Jacobi equations, by regularizing sub or super solutions. Using such techniques, Crandall and Lions extended their analysis of Hamilton Jacobi equations to the infinite dimensional case, proving a comparison principle and a corresponding uniqueness theorem. Crandall and Lions investigated the numerical analysis of their viscosity solutions, proving convergence results both for a finite difference scheme and artificial viscosity. The comparison principle underlying Crandall and Lions' notion of viscosity solution makes their definition naturally applicable to second order elliptic partial differential equations, given the maximum principle. Crandall, Ishii, and Lions' survey article on viscosity solutions for such equations has become a standard reference work.

With Jean Michel Lasry, Lions has contributed to the development of mean field game theory.

Articles. Textbooks.