Professor Carlos Kenig

Carlos E Kenig was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 25 November 1953. He obtained his B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Buenos Aires in 1973, and his M.Sc. in 1975 and Ph.D. in 1978 from the University of Chicago in Mathematics. In 1978 he was appointed as an instructor at Princeton University and then moved to the University of Minnesota as an assistant Professor where he rose to the rank of Professor in 1985. Later in 1985 he moved to the University of Chicago, and in 1999 he was elected as the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Mathematics Department. He has served as President of the International Mathematical Union from 2019 to 2022.

Kenig is recognized for his applications of tools and techniques of harmonic analysis to a number of different areas of partial differential equations. In particular, in the last 30 years Kenig has made pioneering contributions to the study of nonlinear dispersive equation, including his recent research on the long-time behavior of large solutions to critical nonlinear wave equations.

Kenig was awarded the Salem Prize in 1984 and the Bocher Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 2008. Kenig received the Solomon Lefschetz medal of the Mathematical Council of the Americas in 2021 and the ICMAM Latin America Prize in 2024. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1984 and 2002 and a plenary speaker in 2010. In 2017 Kenig delivered the American Mathematical Society’s colloquium lectures.

Kenig is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Mathematical Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, a Foreign Member of the Istituto Lombardo, a Foreign Academician of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Spain, a Corresponding Member of the Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales of Argentina, and a past vice-president of the American Mathematical Society. Kenig has received doctorates honoris causa from the Universite de Cergy-Pontoise and from the Universidad del Pais Vasco.