Lawrence C. Evans

University of California, Berkeley


Primary Section: 11, Mathematics
Secondary Section: 32, Applied Mathematical Sciences
Membership Type:
Member (elected 2014)

Biosketch

Lawrence Craig Evans is currently the Class of 1961 Collegium Professor in the Mathematics Department at UC Berkeley. He was born in 1949 in Atlanta, where he grew up. He took his undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University in 1971 and his PhD from UCLA in 1975, writing his thesis under Michael Crandall's direction. After five years at the University of Kentucky, Evans spent ten years at the University of Maryland, before coming to Berkeley in 1989. Evans was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow for 1979--80, was elected to the American Academy of Arts \& Sciences in 2003 and is currently a fellow of the American Math Society (AMS). He won the UC Berkeley Noyce Prize for undergraduate teaching in 2000, and (jointly with N V Krylov) the AMS Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research in 2004. He gave the Colloquium Lectures at the AMS annual meeting in 2002 and has delivered plenary talks at three joint meetings of the AMS with foreign math societies.

Research Interests

Craig Evans' research program mostly concerns nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE) and related variational and optimization problems. The task of rigorous nonlinear PDE theory is deducing the existence and other properties of solutions, usually without having explicit formulas. This entails deriving hard analytic estimates, and then using these to formulate the proper notion of "solution", often very problem specific. Evans' best work establishes regularity, or sometimes just partial regularity, for solutions of fully nonlinear elliptic PDE (independently done by Krylov), minimizers of quasiconvex energy functions, stationary harmonic maps, etc. He has worked intensively as well on the Crandall--Lions theory of viscosity solutions for certain fully nonlinear PDE, developing applications to stochastic optimal control theory,pattern formation for reaction-diffusion systems (with P. Souganidis), nonlinear averaging effects, mean curvature motion (with J. Spruck), etc.

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