Lions, Pierre-Louis

Pierre-Louis Lions, (born August 11, 1956, Grasse, France), French mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994 for his work on partial differential equations.

Lions earned a doctorate from the University of Paris VI in 1979. He was a professor at the University of Paris IX from 1981 to 2003, and in 1992 he joined the faculty at the École Polytechnique, Palaiseau. In 2002 he began teaching at the Collège de France.

The work for which Lions was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1994 lies largely in classical analysis—mainly nonlinear partial differential equations. In 1983, in work with Michael G. Crandall, he introduced “viscosity solutions” for Hamilton-Jacobi equations, equations that had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation, where he had found solutions using techniques from partial differential equations and probability. Later, with R.J. DiPerna, Lions rigorously demonstrated the existence of solutions to Boltzmann’s equation for the density of colliding hard spheres, given general initial data. Lions made a number of other contributions in the general area of nonlinear partial differential equations and in a variety of areas of applied mathematics, such as stochastic control theory, numerical algorithms for partial differential equations, and image processing.

Lions’s publications include Generalized Solutions of Hamilton-Jacobi Equations (1982), Stochastic Differential Systems, Stochastic Control Theory, and Applications (1988; coedited with Wendell Fleming), and Mathematical Topics in Fluid Mechanics (2 vols., 1996–98).