Elia Brue' to Receive the Pythagoras Award
Elia Bruè, Assistant Professor at the Department of Decision Sciences, will receive the Pythagoras Award 2023 on Thursday, 22 September in Crotone. Established by the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Calabria, with the patronage and scientific supervision of the Italian Mathematical Union, the award is reserved for Italian mathematicians under the age of 30 who have distinguished themselves as excellence in the international scientific community.
Bruè's scientific interests are closely related to issues stemming from physics and encompass two areas: the study of fluid dynamics models, such as the Navier-Stokes equations, and the analysis of connections between the structure and curvature of space in geometric models used in Einstein's general theory of relativity to describe the universe.
"In both cases, we have systems of nonlinear equations to understand, particularly nonlinear equations with some common characteristics, such that insights from one of the two areas have helped clarify or resolve problems in the other," said Bruè. "For my doctoral thesis, for example, I began to study curvature problems and then, together with colleague Daniele Semola and advisor Luigi Ambrosio, we realized how useful techniques employed in fluid dynamics could be."
The Navier-Stokes equations are fully understood only in certain special cases, but it is unknown whether they admit general solutions and whether such solutions accurately describe the underlying phenomena. Their solution is one of the "Millennium Prize Problems" for which the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a one-million-dollar prize.
Bruè, who earned his doctorate at the Scuola Superiore Normale in Pisa and was a post-doc at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton for two years, had already received the Iapichino Award from the National Academy of the Lincei in 2021 and the Stampacchia Award from the National Society of Sciences, Letters, and Arts in 2022.