Yves Meyer receives the 2017 Abel Prize
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2017 to Yves Meyer (77) of the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, France “for his pivotal role in the development of the mathematical theory of wavelets”. The President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Ole M. Sejersted, announced the winner of the 2017 Abel Prize at the Academy in Oslo today, 21 March. Meyer will receive the Abel Prize from His Majesty King Harald V at an award ceremony in Oslo on 23 May.
The full press release can be found here. The Abel Prize is considered to be the most prestigious lifetime achievement award given to a mathematician and its monetary as well as reputation value is at with the Nobel Prizes. Awarded every year, past winners include S. R. S. Varadhan, Endre Szemeredi, John Nash and Sir Andrew Wiles among others.
Yves Meyer, born on 19 July, 1939, came first in was placed first in the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure in 1957. He completed his PhD in 1966 at the University of Strasbourg. He was professor at the Paris Dauphine University, at the École Polytechnique (1980–1986) and invited professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (2000). Meyer was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1970 in Nice, in 1983 in Warsaw, and in 1990 in Kyoto. He is a member of the Académie des Sciences since 1993. He was awarded the 2010 Gauss Prize for fundamental contributions to number theory, operator theory and harmonic analysis, and his pivotal role in the development of wavelets and multiresolution analysis. A biography can be found here.
The theory of wavelet analysis has been applied in a wide variety of arenas as diverse as applied and computational harmonic analysis, data compression, noise reduction, medical imaging, archiving, digital cinema, deconvolution of the Hubble space telescope images, and the recent LIGO detection of gravitational waves created by the collision of two black holes. It was Yves Meyer’s expertise in the mathematics of the Calderón-Zygmund theory that opened the way for the development of wavelet theory, providing a remarkably fruitful link between a problem set squarely in pure mathematics and a theory with wide applicability in the real world.
The announcement was followed by John Rognes, the chair of the Abel Committee, who gave reasons for the awarding of the prize. This was followed by a popular science talk on the works of Yves Meyer by the world famous mathematician Terence Tao.
The video of the broadcast can be found here.
The Abel Prize Laureate 2017, Yves Meyer
(Photo: B. Eymann/Académie des sciences)