Alberto Calderón

Alberto Pedro Calderón ( born September 14, 1920 in Mendoza, Argentina, † April 16, 1998 in Chicago) was an Argentine mathematician who worked on Analysis. He is known for his theory of singular integral equations.

Calderón went to Switzerland and Mendoza to school, studied electrical engineering in Buenos Aires ( completion 1947) and then mathematics. 1948 visited Antoni Zygmund, a professor in Chicago and a leading expert in harmonic analysis, Buenos Aires and became aware of Calderón. 1950 Calderón Zygmund at in Chicago (where he was a Rockefeller fellowship) received his doctorate with a thesis on harmonic analysis and ergodic theory. After that, he was from 1950 to 1953 Associate Professor at the Ohio State University and from 1953 to 1955 at the Institute for Advanced Study. After a period from 1955 to 1959 as an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he became in 1959 a professor at the University of Chicago, where he remained until his retirement in 1985, of a time as a professor at MIT ( 1972-1975 ) and a visiting scholar in Argentina apart. 1970 to 1972 he was chairman of the mathematics department in Chicago.

Calderón worked on singular integral operators. This is also called the Calderón - Zygmund theory, or even speaks of the Calderón - Zygmund School of harmonic analysis. Important elements of this theory are the lemma of Calderón - Zygmund and Calderon - Zygmund operators. He also worked on partial differential equations and its links with harmonic analysis (Fourier analysis). One of his most important works (quoted by awarded the Steele Prize ) concerned the uniqueness of the solution of the Cauchy problem in 1958. He himself did not write textbooks, not even about his main field of work ( for other members of the Chicago school of Zygmund as Elias Stein).

In 1978 he received the Bôcher Memorial Prize, the 1989 Wolf Prize and the Leroy P. Steele Prize in 1991 and the National Medal of Science. In 1989 he was awarded the Argentine Consagración Nacional Prize. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (since 1968) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also a member of the French, Argentine and Latin American ( seat Venezuela) Academies of Sciences. Since 1975, he has an honorary professorship in Buenos Aires. In 1978 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Helsinki ( commutators, Singular integrals on Lipschitz Curves and Applications) and 1966 he was invited speaker at the ICM in Moscow ( Algebras of singular integral operators ).

He was married twice and had two children from his first marriage. His first wife, with whom he had been married since 1950, died 1985, married in 1989 and Calderón the mathematician Alexandra Bellow.