Prestigious prize to LiU mathematician Andreas Rosén

Andreas Rosén, senior lecturer at the Department of Mathematics (MAI), has received the Wallenberg Prize, the best-known Swedish prize for promising young doctorate mathematicians.

The Swedish Mathematical Society has awarded the prize since 1983 and for the first time the prize has gone to a researcher at LiU. Rosén shares the prize with Kristian Bjerklöv from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. As well as the honour, the prize includes a sum of SEK 300,000 and was awarded at the Society’s annual meeting in Gothenburg on 1 June.

So MAI had every reason to celebrate with a cake when the winners were announced.

“It’s always a bit of a surprise when you win an award,” Rosén commented. “But as well as the money and the honour, more than anything else it’s confirmation that you are on the right track as a researcher. It really inspires your future work.”

This isn’t the first time Rosén has won an award. In 2009 he won the Tage Erlander Prize for research in Natural Sciences and Technology – with a sum of SEK 150,000 – and in 2010 he received the “Young Researcher Award” at an international mathematics conference at the University of Macau in China. He defended his thesis in 2003 in Canberra, Australia and has spent a period as post-doc at the Université Paris-Sud in France.

“Andreas’s vision and ability to pursue mathematics has taken him to the forefront of research in his area of analysis. He truly deserves this prize,” writes Pascal Auscher, professor of mathematics at Université Paris-Sud, in an article about Rosén’s research in the May issue of Bulletinen, the Mathematics Society’s publication.

At the moment, Rosén is on a three-year research grant from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) for the project "Harmonic analysis for non-smooth elliptic systems of partial differential equations".

“Mathematics is very theoretical and it can be quite difficult to explain to people,” says Andreas Rosén when he talks about his research on harmonic analysis.
“It’s about understanding the components of oscillation or signals, or of function as we mathematicians call them. The classic origin was Fourier’s mathematical studies of oscillations, for example of a violin string. He succeeded in calculating how to split the oscillation into pure harmonic tones.

In modern harmonic analysis the functions are divided into other kinds of components, known as wavelets, meaning “small waves”, which is a basic technique in my research. Using this kind of technique you can understand, for example, how waves are reflected by irregular surfaces with corners and edges, or how they are transmitted through strongly inhomogeneous materials.”

The Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation finance the Wallenberg Prize.

“Mathematics research rarely gets any headlines, and the general public often have a rather hazy idea of what mathematicians do. This is why prestigious awards are perhaps extra important in mathematics, as a means of spreading knowledge about this research,” the foundation writes on its website.

 

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Related Links

• Andreas Rosén
• Department of Mathematics (MAI) 
• The Marcus Wallenberg Prize 
• The Swedish Mathematical Society  
• Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) 

Gunilla Pravitz 2012-05-22