Fokas Athanasios

Mathematics/Applied Mathematics   (2005)  

Education

B.S. in Aeronautics, Imperial College, UK, June 1975; Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, California Institute of Technology, USA, June 1979 (supervisor: P. A. Lagerstrom); M.D, School of Medicine, University of Miami, USA, June 1986.

Employment

Appointed in 1982 Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Clarkson University, USA. Promoted in 1986 to Professor and Chairman, a position held until 1993, when appointed to a Chair in Mathematical Sciences in Loughborough University, UK. Appointed in 1995 to a Chair in Applied Mathematics at Imperial College. Appointed in 2002 to the inaugural Chair of Nonlinear Mathematical Science at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge. In January 2021, he became Professor Emeritus and was appointed Director of the Mathematical Legacy Programme in the University of Cambridge, funded by the Gianna Aggelopoulou Programme in Science and Innovation.

Visiting Professor at the University of Stanford for the academic year 1986-87 where he collaborated with J. B. Keller, and at Harvard University in the autumn of 2012 where he taught a course on the unified transform (now known as the Fokas method).

Appointed in 2015 Adjunct Professor of the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Southern California, USA, for a period of four years. Appointed in 2019 Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California, USA, for a period of five years.

Awards and Honours

Fokas’ first significant award was the 1975 Governors Prize of Imperial College, awarded to the best student in Aeronautics. Since then, he has been the recipient of several honours, including those mentioned below.

For the academic year 1979-1980 he was honoured at the Department of Applied Mathematics of California Institute of Technology with the prestigious Saul Kaplun Fellowship.

In 2000, he was the recipient of the Naylor Prize of the London Mathematical Society. This is awarded every two years, and although it was given in 1999 (to S.W. Hawking) it was decided to be awarded in 2000 on the occasion of the Millennium. In 2004, he was awarded the Aristeion Prize of the Academy of Athens, which is the most prestigious prize of the Academy given every four years to a single scholar chosen from the Sciences, Engineering, or Medicine. In 2006, he was awarded by the President of the Hellenic Republic the Excellence Prize of the Bodossaki Foundation, jointly with Professor D. Christodoulou (this premier scientific prize was awarded in the period 2002-2012 every two years to scientists of Greek origin, as chosen by an international committee chaired by a Nobel Laureate). In 2023, he was awarded the Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences, “for the Fokas method, which is considered the most important development in the solution of partial differential equations since the works of Fourier, Laplace and Cauchy”. He is the 2024 recipient of the SIAM’s Kruskal Award/Lecture “for his contributions to the development of the inverse scattering transform, for his new method for boundary-value problems (Fokas method), and for his work on the asymptotic analysis of the Riemann zeta function”.

In December 2004, he was elected a Full Member of the Academy of Athens (this is the National Academy of Greece, consisting of about 45 members covering the Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, Arts, Letters, Political and Ethical Sciences; Fokas is the first ever applied mathematician to be elected in the Academy). Also, he is a member of all three major Academies of Europe, namely, European Academy of Sciences (2010), European Academy of Sciences and Arts (2021), Academia Europaea (2023). He is one of only 11 Honorary Members of the World Academy of Sciences (seven of them are Nobel Laureates).

In 2005, he was Decorated with the Order of Phoenix by the President of the Hellenic Republic (only 15 people from Greece or abroad are included every year in the list of Honours).

In 2005, he was elected a Professorial Fellow of Clare Hall. In 2009, he was awarded a Fellowship of the Guggenheim Foundation, USA. In 2019, he was elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (only a handful of mathematicians are fellows of this prestigious College). In 2024 he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2024, he was invited to become a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association, as well as a Fellow of the Industry Academy (part of the International Artificial Intelligence Industry).

For the period 2015-2021 he was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). During this period, he was on a fully paid leave of absence from the University of Cambridge which allowed him to concentrate on his research.

Fokas has published more than 400 papers in a remarkably broad range of topics, in Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, Biology, Medicine, Philosophy, and the Arts. ISI Web of Science has included Fokas in the list of the most highly cited researchers in the field of Mathematics (Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Probability and Statistics), http://www.isihighlycited.com. According to Google scholar, he has approximately 27,000 citations and an h-index of 81. In April of 2022, Clare Hall announced that, according to the ranking based on the h-index calculated by research.com, Fokas was ranked first among all mathematicians of all times of the two mathematics departments of the University of Cambridge, namely, the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and the Department of Pure Mathematics and Theoretical Statistics. This achievement was also confirmed in the research.com announcement of April 2024. In 2020, his paper ‘Rogue waves of the nonlocal Davey-Stewartson I equation’, published in 2018 in Nonlinearity, received an ‘Institute of Physics (IOP) Publishing Top Cited Paper Award’, as one of the most cited articles within the period of 2018 to 2020 published across the entire IOP Publishing journal portfolio, consisting of 50 prestigious journals.

The volume Chaos, Fractals and Complexity, published in 2023 in the series ‘Springer Proceedings in Complexity’, is dedicated to Fokas’ 70th birthday. Part IV of this volume, titled ‘Fokas and Mathematics’, contains several papers inspired by some of his breakthroughs. Also, there is a paper titled, ‘Athanasios Fokas: a Renaissance Scientist’, where the seminal contributions of Fokas in Mathematics, Engineering, Physics, Biology, and Medicine are summarised. These proceedings are based on the 28th Summer School-Conference on Dynamical Systems and Complexity, July 2022. Two days of this conference were dedicated to 24 lectures inspired by some of the most important works of Fokas.

In July 2024, the journal Studies in Applied Mathematics published the Special Issue “Integrable Systems and its Applications (Celebrating the 70th birthday of Thanasis Fokas)”. In the preface of this issue there is an article providing a thorough summary of Fokas’ contributions emphasising their remarkable breadth and depth. Also, “it contains a selection of papers that all use in someways the ground-breaking mathematical ideas and techniques introduced by Thanasis over his long and exceptionally prolific career.”

He has received honorary degrees from eight universities. Also, in special ceremonies, Fokas has received the following honours: In 2010, he was appointed Ambassador of Hellenism, Greece, in the presence of the President of the Hellenic Republic. In 2019, he received a Life Achievement Award from the Hellenic Mathematical Association (in the last 40 years, only D. Christodoulou has received this honour). In 2014, he was honoured by the Hellenic Medical Society of UK, in 2015 by the European Musculoskeletal Oncology Society, in 2016 by the Greek-American Medical Society, and in 2023 by the Society of the Ionian Islands.

He is a founding member of the Ionian Academy; an honorary member of the Institute of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Greece, 2002; an honorary member of the Parnassos Literary Society, Athens, Greece, 2005; an honorary citizen of Oinouses, Greece, 2004; and an honorary citizen of Delphi, Greece, 2009. He has been honoured twice by the Onassis Foundation, appointed an Onassis Senior Visiting Scholar, first at the University of Harvard, USA, in the autumn of 2012, and then, at the University of Southern California, USA, in the Spring of 2015.

External Support

Fokas has the distinction of having been funded throughout his academic life in US and in UK. Specifically, in 1982-1995, he was funded by the Mathematics Section of the National Science Foundation of USA. In addition, during this period he was also supported by the Mathematics Division of the Office of the Naval Research of USA, 1982-1988, and by the Mathematics Division of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research of USA, 1987-1995. Moreover, he was funded from the time of his first appointment in UK until his retirement from the University of Cambridge, first by SERC (1994-1997) and then by EPSRC. In addition, during this period he was also supported by the following funding bodies: the European Community, EC-TMR, 1998-2000, 2000-2002, 2002-2004, 2006-2009 and 2005-2008 when he was awarded one of only 10 chairs of excellence funded in the entire EU; the Royal Society, 2000 and 2003; MRC 2009. In addition, Fokas was a co-investigator in the 2.5 million pounds grant “Mathematical Imaging in Healthcare”, 2016-2020.

Invited Lectures

Fokas has presented invited talks in major institutions world-wide, including in the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College, UCL, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Caltech, Yale, Berkley, Columbia, UCLA, ETH and Poincare Institute.

Among his Invited Lectures are the following:

• Differential forms, Spectral Theory and Boundary Value Problems, The Naylor Lecture, London Mathematical Society, London, UK, November 23, 2001.
• Generalised Fourier Transforms, Dirichlet to Neumann Maps and the Imaging of the Brain, SIAM Invited Lecture at the Annual meeting of AMS and MAA, San Antonio, USA, January 2006.
• Integrability, Medical Imaging and Boundary Value Problems, University of Cambridge Jubilee Celebration, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, September 25, 2009.
• The Interplay of the Concrete and General: From Mathematics to the Brain, The Distinguished Lagerstrom Lecture, Department of Aerospace, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA, May 9, 2014.
• Initial-Boundary Value Problems in 1+1, and Solitons in 3+1, Invited Plenary Lecture in the 2014 SIAM Conference on Nonlinear Waves and Coherent Structures, Cambridge, UK, August 11-14, 2014.
• From Acoustics to the Lindel¨of Hypothesis, The Keller Colloquium in Computational Mathematics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA, October 8, 2018.
• On the Fokas method and beyond, Annual Symposium and Ceremony of the European Academy of Sciences, Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, F´ısicas y Naturales, Madrid, Spain, October 23-24, 2023.
• The beauty and usefulness of the complex analysis, Invited talk in the ‘International Conference on Applied Mathematics’, Hong-Kong, China, May 30, 2024.
• The beauty and usefulness of the complex analysis, Martin D. Kruskal Lecture, 2024 SIAM Conference on Nonlinear Waves and Coherent Structures (NWCS24), Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 26, 2024.

Among the sets of invited lectures delivered by Fokas are the following:

• Complex Analysis and Inverse Spectral Method in Boundary Value Problems. A four Lectures Mini course at the Poincare Institute, France, November 2003.
• New Perspectives for Boundary Value Problems and Their Asymptotic Analysis. Ten lectures as the Principal speaker in an NSF-CBMS Conference, University of Texas - Pan American, Edinburgh, USA, May 16-20, 2005.
• Boundary Value Problems and Medical Imaging. Series of twelve lectures, Harvard University, USA, September 2012.
• Three lectures within the framework of the Gentry Lecture Series, Wake Forest University, USA, Spring 2022.

Fokas has also delivered a number of lectures for the general audience, including the following:

• Mathematics and the Search of Truth, Opening Address at the 45th International Mathematical Olympiad, Athens Concert Hall (Megaron), Athens, Greece, July 11, 2004.
• Mathematics, Imaging of the Brain and the Search for Truth, Oxford University, Oxford, UK, April 28, 2005.
• Mathematics and the Brain, Athens Concert Hall (Megaron), Athens, Greece, March 31, 2006.
• Mathematics, Medical Imaging and the Search for Consciousness, Tsingua Global Vision Lecture, Tsingua University, Beijing, China, June 12, 2008.
• Innate Knowledge: From Philosophical Positions of Ancient Greeks to Neuroscience, Royal Society of Medicine, London, UK, February 27, 2010.
• The Importance of Unconscious Processes, Hippocratic Oration, Hellenic Medical Society, London, UK, November 7, 2014.
• Perception and the Essence of Mathematics, Athens Science Festival, Athens, Greece, April 24, 2018.
• Associations: Visual Perception and Reduction Versus Unification, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, March 29, 2019.
• Perception as the Solution of an Inverse Problem, in the Colloquium series of the European Academy of Science and Art, “Science meets Art”, March 4, 2022.
• The two ‘big bangs’ of our mental evolution, The International Centre for Primate Brain Research, Shanghai, China, May 27, 2024.
• The two ‘big bangs’ of our mental evolution (the inaugural talk of a new series emphasising polymathy), West Hub, Cambridge, UK, June 13, 2024.

Editorial and Advisory Boards

Fokas has served on the International Advisory Boards of several Institutions including: the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Imperial College, UK; the Centre for Nonlinear Mathematics and Applications, Loughborough University, UK; the International Centre of Theoretical Physics–Eurasian Centre for Advanced Research (ICTP-ECAR). He is a co-founder of the Journal of Nonlinear Science; associated Editor of the Series Progress in Physics and Mathematical Physics (Birkh¨auser); member of the Editorial Board of the series Modern Mechanics and Mathematics (CRC) and of the series Program in Mathematics (de Gruyter; a member of the Board of Editors for the Diamond Open Access Book Series. He has been a member of the Editorial Board of several Journals, including Proceedings of the Royal Society (Series A), Selecta Mathematica, Journal of Mathematical Physics, Nonlinearity, Studies in Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Physics, Analysis and Geometry, and the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications.

Fokas was the President of the Governing body of the National Library of Greece for the period 2005-2011. He is currently the President of the scientific committee of the Laskaridis Foundation, as well as a member of the Governing Body of the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens (BRFAA). He serves on the Advisory Board of the Goulandris Natural History Museum, as well as of the Ionian Hall of Fame.

Fokas has been the co-organiser of several International conferences and workshops, including two workshops at the Isaac Newton Institute, as well as the 2nd International workshop “The Brain: Function, Imaging and Repair” at the Goulandris Natural History Museum/GAIA Centre (co-organised with F. Kafatos), Athens, October, 2009.