Prof. Eduardo Teixeira, University of Central Florida, USA (formerly at Federal University of Ceará, Brazil)

The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) announced earlier this year that the 2017 Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians from Developing Countries has been awarded to Eduardo Teixeira of the Federal University of Ceará, Brazil. The prize is in recognition of Teixeira's outstanding work in Analysis and Partial Differential Equations and is awarded jointly by ICTP, the Department of Science and Technology (DST, Government of India), and the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The 2017 prize award ceremony will take place on Thursday 12 October 2017 in the Budinich Lecture Hall, at ICTP at 16.30 hrs. Abstract: Free boundaries are mathematical manifestations of sharp changes in the parameters that describe a given problem. Typically, different physical laws are to be prescribed in distinct, a priori unknown subregions. This is the case, for instance, of problems involving different states of matter. Free boundaries also arise in physical reactions where interfaces retain some portion of the system’s energy, viz., latent heat, membranes, dead cores, flux balances, and so forth. The development of the contemporary free boundary theory has promoted major knowledge leverage across pure and applied sciences and in this talk I will provide a panoramic overview of such endeavor. Towards the end, I will describe how geometric insights pertaining to the systematic study of free boundary problems can be imported as to investigate regularity issues in nonlinear diffusive partial differential equations, leading to a plethora of unanticipated results.