Awarded to Professor Stefan Müller (Max Planck Institut fur Mathematik in den Naturwissenschaften) in recognition of his outstanding early contributions to applied mathematics.
Stefan Müller, born in 1962, studied mathematics and physics in Bonn, Edinburgh, and Paris. In 1994, at the age of 32 years, he became full professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and shortly later vice director of the famous Mathematical Research Center in the Black Forest. In 1995 he was appointed to a full professorship at the ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Since 1996 he is one of the three directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.
The scientific work of Stefan Müller is distinguished by highly original and profound contributions to applied mathematics, calculus of variations and nonlinear partial differential equations, the mechanics of continua, and mathematical material sciences. In these fields he is one of the leading scientists in the world. His papers on the mechanics of continua cover a broad spectrum of topics, like homogenization in materials, cavitation in gummy materials, and completely new existence theorems in nonlinear elasticity concerning the geometry of microstructures.
In nonlinear elasticity he proved new integrability properties of determinants with gradients as entries. This led to a breakthrough with respect to numerous problems characterized by critical growth properties. In joint work with Vladimir Sverak, he discovered that already for harmless looking variational problems with smooth, strictly convex Lagrangians, there exist highly irregular extremals that are Lipschitz-continuous, but not differentiable. In the last years, Stefan Müller made substantial and highly original contributions to the mathematical theory of microstructures. This concerns, for example, solid-state phase transitions in elastic crystals.
Stefan Müller is one of very few young mathematicians in the world who combine high-quality mathematical skills with a feeling for real-world problems. This kind of scientific work should be promoted and is recognized by the CICIAM Collatz Prize.
Subcommittee for the 1999 ICIAM/CICIAM Collatz Prize
- Reinhard Mennicken (chair);
- Masayasu Mimura;
- Hilary Ockendon;
- Michael L. Overton;
- Jean-Pierre Puel;
- Gregory I. Shivashinsky.