| Athanassios S. Fokas | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 30, 1952 Cefalonia, Greece |
| Nationality | Greek |
| Fields | Mathematician |
| Institutions | Clarkson University Imperial College London University of Cambridge |
| Alma mater | Cal Tech |
| Doctoral advisor | Paco Lagerstrom |
| Known for | Calogero-Degasperis-Fokas equation |
| Notable awards | Naylor Prize Guggenheim Fellowship (2009) Aristeion Prize in Sciences of the Academy of Athens (2004) New Year's list of honours (2005) of the President of the Hellenic Republic Commander of the Order of the Phoenix (2005) Honorary Doctorate of Sciences – Technical University of Crete (2004) Honorary Doctorate of Mathematics – University of Patras (2004) Honorary Doctorate of Applied Mathematics and Physical Sciences – Technical University of Athens (2004) Honorary Doctorate in Mathematics – University of Athens (2006) |
Athanassios Spyridon Fokas (Greek: Αθανάσιος Σπυρίδων Φωκάς; b. June 30, 1952) is a Greek mathematician, known for work in the field of integrable nonlinear partial differential equations.
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Fokas earned a BS in Aeronautics from Imperial College in 1975 and a PhD in Applied mathematics from Caltech in 1979. His dissertation, Invariants, Lie-Backlund Operators and Backlund Transformations, was written under the direction of Paco Lagerstrom. Fokas subsequently attended University of Miami School of Medicine, earning an MD in 1986.
After medical school, Fokas was appointed Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Clarkson University in 1986. From there, he moved to Imperial College in 1996 to become chair of Applied Mathematics. He has been a Professor of Mathematics at University of Cambridge and Chair in Nonlinear Mathematical Science since 2002. He was elected a Member of the Academy of Athens in 2004 and a professorial fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge in 2005.
Fokas received the Naylor Prize from the London Mathematical Society in 2000.[1]
Fokas is married to Regina Fokas and they have three children: Alexander, Anastassia, and Ioanna.
Broadly speaking, Fokas' work is concentrated in applied mathematics and mathematical physics. He has examined a large class of partial differential equations, both linear and non-linear, and especially including boundary value problems. Much of his work has naturally extended to applied areas, such as fluid mechanics, medical imaging, and protein folding. His body of work has been published in over 150 peer-reviewed journal articles and he is listed as highly-cited researcher in mathematics in the Institute for Scientific Information citation database.