Concept
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. Lions' earliest work dealt with the functional analysis of Hilbert spaces. His first published article, in 1977, was a contribution to the vast literature on convergence of certain iterative algorithms to fixed points of a given nonexpansive self-map of a closed convex subset of Hilbert space. In collaboration with his thesis advisor Haïm Brézis, Lions gave new results about maximal monotone operators in Hilbert space, proving one of the first convergence results for Bernard Martinet and R.
