| Lamberto Cesari | |
|---|---|
| Born | 23 September 1910 Bologna |
| Died | 12 March 1990 Ann Arbor |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Fields | mathematics |
| Institutions | Istituto Nazionale per le Applicazioni del Calcolo, Università di Pisa, Università di Bologna |
| Alma mater | Scuola Normale Superiore |
| Doctoral advisor | Leonida Tonelli |
| Other academic advisors | Constantin Carathéodory, Mauro Picone |
| Doctoral students | Jack Kenneth Hale |
| Known for | functions of bounded variation, nonlinear functional analysis |
| Influences | Mathematical analysis, functional analysis, Calculus of variation |
Lamberto Cesari (23 September 1910 Bologna – 12 March 1990 Ann Arbor) was an Italian mathematician naturalized in the United States.
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In 1933, he was awarded his laurea at the Scuola Normale Superiore at Pisa under the direction of Leonida Tonelli. After a period of study from 1934 to 1935 in Germany at Monaco di Baviera under the direction of Constantin Carathéodory, he went back to Pisa at the Scuola Normale Superiore for a year, and then to Rome at the Istituto Nazionale per le Applicazioni del Calcolo, at the time directed by Mauro Picone. From 1938 to 1946 he went back as a professore incaricato at Pisa University: in 1947 he was at the University of Bologna as a professor of mathematical analysis. In 1948 he went to the United States as a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, at Purdue University in Lafayette, at the University of California - Berkeley and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1960 he was appointed as a professor of mathematical analysis at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where he remained until his retirement in 1981. In 1976 he became a citizen of the United States, while keeping close scientific contacts with the Italian mathematical community.
The department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan honored the memory of Lamberto Cesari with the creation of a professorship chair, currently held by the mathematician Joel Smoller.
He is remembered for his achievements on the Plateau's problem, on the theory of parametric minimal surfaces, on Lebesgue measure of continuous and related other variational problems: he also worked in the field of optimal control and studied periodic solutions of systems of nonlinear ordinary differential equations by using methods of nonlinear functional analysis. In the paper (Cesari 1936) he introduced a generalization of functions of bounded variation to the multi-dimensional setting, now acknowledged as the most versatile of such generaizations. He wrote about 250 scientific works on topics such as non linear functional analysis, measure theory, optimal control: his published works include the fundamental monographs Cesari 1956, Cesari 1971 and Cesari 1971.