Franco Brezzi, a professor of mathematical analysis at the Institute of Higher Studies in Italy, the Director of the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Computer Technologies of the Italian National Research Council, and the president of the Italian Mathematical Union, will present the Russell Marker Lectures in the Mathematical Sciences from April 19 to 22, on Penn State's University Park campus. The free public lectures are sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.
The series, which will take place in 114 McAllister Building, begins with a lecture intended for a general audience, titled "Approximations on General Geometries," at 8 p.m. on April 19. Brezzi will give three additional lectures of a more specialized nature: "Numerical Approximations of Plate Problems" at 4:30 p.m. on April 20; "Mimetic Finite Differences: The Latest Point of View" at 4:30 p.m. on April 21; and "Approximations of Elasticity Problems with Reduced Symmetry" at 4:30 p.m. on April 22.
Brezzi currently ranks among most highly-cited researchers in mathematics, according to a recent analysis by the Institute for Scientific Information. His contributions to mathematics have been honored with a number of prestigious international prizes, including the Citta di Cagliari Prize in 1991, the T.H.H. Pian Medal in 2000, the International Association for Computational Mechanics Gauss-Newton Medal in 2004, and the SIAM Von Neumann Award in 2009.
In addition to his position as president of the Italian Mathematical Union, Brezzi's leadership positions in the mathematics community include serving as a member of the executive committee of the European Mathematical Society and as chief editor of a number of journals, including Numerische Mathematik, Mathematical Models and Methods in Applied Sciences, Springer Lecture Notes of the Unione Matematica Italiana, and Bollettino UMI. From 2005 to 2009, he also was a member of the Conseil Scientifique of the National Center for Scientific Researches of France.
His scientific interests are in the broad area of applied mathematics, with a particular focus on computational methods. His extensive research program includes contributions to many areas of mathematical inquiry, including finite-element methods; existence, uniqueness and regularity of the solutions of boundary-value problems for partial differential equations; approximation of variational inequalities and free-boundary problems; finite-dimensional discretizations of bifurcation problems; and domain-decomposition methods.
He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the University of Pavia, Italy, in 1967. He has been a professor of mathematical analysis at Italian universities since 1975, first at the Polytechnic Institute of Turin, then at the University of Pavia, and currently at the University Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Pavia.
The Marker Lectures were established in 1984 through a gift from Russell Earl Marker, professor emeritus of chemistry at Penn State, whose pioneering synthetic methods revolutionized the steroid-hormone industry and opened the door to the current era of hormone therapies including the birth-control pill. The Marker endowment allows the Penn State Eberly College of Science to present annual Marker Lectures in astronomy and astrophysics, the chemical sciences, evolutionary biology, genetic engineering, the mathematical sciences and physics. For more information about the lectures or for access assistance, contact Flossie Dunlop at 814-865-8462 or dunlop@math.psu.edu.