Nader Masmoudi Wins King Faisal Prize in Science

January 9, 2022

Dear Colleagues,

I am delighted to share the exciting news that our colleague Nader Masmoudi, professor of mathematics, has been awarded the 2022 King Faisal Prize in Science in the field of mathematics. Ranked among the most prestigious international awards for scholars and scientists, the Prize is a glowing testament to Nader’s outstanding work and the excellence of research and teaching at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Nader, who is a professor of mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, is an affiliated faculty member at NYUAD, and he leads our NYUAD Research Institute Center for Stability, Instability and Turbulence as Principal Investigator. He has devoted his work to the analysis of partial differential equations, is the author of more than 160 papers, and has been cited over 5000 times.

Nader Masmoudi’s most spectacular contribution is in incompressible fluids. The evolution of an incompressible fluid, when viscosity forces are neglected, is governed by a system introduced by Euler in the middle of the eighteenth century. In three-dimensional space, the study of global solutions to this system remains a widely open problem. In two-dimensional space, the conservation of the vorticity along the flow allowed scholars to establish the existence and uniqueness of a solution with a given initial datum. However, apart from the case of stationary or time periodic solutions, the long time behavior of solutions has never been described. Masmoudi was the first one to achieve this feat in a masterful paper in Publications de l’IHES in 2015, written in collaboration with Jacob Bedrossian.

The King Faisal Prize is yet another milestone in Nader’s remarkable academic career, and the latest in a series of honors and awards, including his election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2021, the Kuwait Prize in 2019, and the Fermat Prize in 2017. He received a chair of excellence from the Foundation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris from 2016-2017, a Senior Clay Math Scholar in fall 2014, placed first at the Concours of École Normale Supérieure and Ecole Polytechnique in 1994, won a Presidential prize in Tunisia in the same year, and received the gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1992.

Nader earned his Maîtrise as well as DEA and Agregation in mathematics from the École Normale Supérieure Paris and PhD in mathematics from Paris Dauphine University.

Please join me in congratulating Nader for this great honor and recognition. 

Arlie