Jacques-Louis Lions

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Jacques-Louis Lions (May 3, 1928 – May 17, 2001) was a French mathematician who made contributions to the theory of partial differential equations and to stochastic control, among other areas. He received the SIAM's John Von Neumann prize in 1986.

[edit] Biography

After being part of the french Résistance in 1943 and 1944, J-L Lions enters the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1947. Professor of mathematics at the Université of Nancy, at the Faculty of Sciences of Paris, and at the Ecole Polytechnique, he joins the prestigious Collège de France as well as the french Academy of Science in 1973. In 1979, he is appointed director of the Institut National de la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA), where he teaches and promotes the use of numerical simulations using finite elements integration. Alongs his career, J-L Lions insists on the use of mathematics in the industry, with a particular involvement in the french space program, as well as in domains such as energy or environment. This eventually leads him to be director of Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) from 1984 to 1992.

Jacques-Louis Lions has also been elected president of the International Mathematical Union in 1991 and received the Price of Japan that same year. He was elected president of the french Academy of Sciences in 1996. He has left a considerable work, among others more than 400 scientific articles, 20 volumes of mathematics that were translated in English and Russian, and major contributions to several collective works, among which the 4000 pages of the monumental Mathematical analysis and numerical methods for science and technology (in collaboration with Robert Dautray), as well as the Handbook of numerical analysis in 7 volumes (with Philippe G. Ciarlet).

His son Pierre-Louis Lions is also a well known mathematician who was awarded a Fields Medal in 1994.