Charles Louis Fefferman (born April 18, 1949) is an American
mathematician at
Princeton University, where he is currently the Herbert E. Jones, Jr. '43 University Professor of Mathematics. He was awarded the
Fields Medal in 1978 for his contributions to
mathematical analysis.
Early life and education
Fefferman was born to a Jewish family,[1][2] in Washington, DC. He was a
child prodigy entered the
University of Maryland at age 14,[3][4][7] and had written his first scientific paper by the age of 15.[3] He graduated with degrees in math and physics at 17,[8] and earned his
PhD in mathematics three years later from
Princeton University, under
Elias Stein. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Inequalities for strongly singular convolution operators".[9] Fefferman achieved a full professorship at the
University of Chicago at the age of 22, making him the youngest full professor ever appointed in the United States.[6]
Career
At the age of 25, he returned to Princeton as a full professor, becoming the youngest person to be promoted to the title.[10] He won the
Alan T. Waterman Award in 1976[4] (the first person to get the award) and the
Fields Medal in 1978 for his work in
mathematical analysis, specifically convergence and divergence.[3] He was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences in 1979.[11] He was appointed the Herbert Jones Professor at Princeton in 1984.
Charles Fefferman and his wife Julie have two daughters, Nina and Lainie. Lainie Fefferman is a composer, taught math at
Saint Ann's School and holds a degree in music from
Yale University as well as a Ph.D. in music composition from Princeton.[21] She has an interest in
Middle Eastern music.[22]Nina Fefferman is a computational biologist residing at the University of Tennessee whose research is concerned with the application of mathematical models to complex biological systems.[23] Charles Fefferman's brother,
Robert Fefferman, is also a mathematician and former Dean of the Physical Sciences Division at the
University of Chicago.[24]
Works
The following are among Fefferman's best-known papers:
Constantin, P.; Fefferman, C.; Majda, A. J. (1996), "Geometric constraints on potentially singular solutions for the 3-D Euler equations", Communications in Partial Differential Equations, 21 (3–4): 559–571,
doi:
10.1080/03605309608821197
^The Jewish lists: physicists and generals, actors and writers, and hundreds of other lists of accomplished Jews,
Martin Harry Greenberg, (Schocken, 1979), page 110
^American Jewish Year Book 2017: The Annual Record of the North American Jewish Communities, Arnold Dashefsky, Ira M. Sheskin, (Springer, 2018), page 796