Schlag appointed the Phillips Professor of Mathematics
Wilhelm Schlag, an expert in harmonic analysis, mathematical physics, and partial differential equations, has been appointed the Phillips Professor of Mathematics, effective April 17.
He is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in the Department of Mathematics.
Schlag joined the Yale faculty in 2018, and immediately became a vital and prolific contributor to Yale’s formidable group in analysis. Since arriving at Yale, he has taken on many important roles, including serving as interim chair of the Mathematics department in fall of 2019, and playing a central role in the planning process for the department’s upcoming move to new space in Kline Tower.
He received his M.A. from Technical University of Vienna, and earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.
Schlag is a recipient of the Sloan and Guggenheim fellowships, among others. He was a Plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematical Physics in 2012 as well as an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014. Prior to joining the Yale faculty, he was appointed as the Holmer J. Livingston Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. Before that, he served as professor at the California Institute of Technology, and as assistant professor at Princeton.
Schlag is internationally renowned: recent speaking engagements have taken him around the world and include such venues as the Tosio Kato Centennial Conference in Tokyo, Japan and the Essen Lectures in Uppsala, Sweden. He serves on the editorial board of core journals in the discipline, including Inventiones Mathematicae, which is considered one of the top three journals in mathematics in the world. Before that, he served on the board of ten other journals, including Communications in Mathematical Physicals, and the Journal of Geometric and Functional Analysis. Through his involvement with these bodies, he plays a key role in setting the agenda for mathematical research. For the past twenty years, his work has been partially supported by the National Science Foundation.
Much of Schlag’s work has been devoted to the study of wave propagation, both in structured as well as disordered, media. Modern society relies extensively on engineering applications involving transmission of waves. Cell phone communications, satellite data transmissions, and information on the internet moving along thousands of miles of glass fiber cables, are all controlled by mathematics describing the motion of waves. A striking feature of this theory is its universality. In fact, waves propagating on astronomical scales such as the gravitational waves detected by LIGO, or seismic waves in the earth’s mantle, as well as waves on a microscopic scale ‑ such as those emitted by atoms in the form of electromagnetic radiation in a laser or microwave ‑ are governed by the same mathematical theories.
