The General Awards Committee of the Fondazione Internazionale Balzan has awarded the 2019 Premio Balzan for the "Theory of partial differential equations" to Professor Luigi Ambrosio, Director of the Scuola Normale Superiore. The announcement was made today (9 september) in Milan, at the institutional headquarters of the Fondazione, (the latter is also located in Zurich). The Premio Balzan is named after the Italian journalist and entrepreneur Eugenio Balzan and is annually awarded to scholars and scientists who have excelled at an international level. The award amounts to 750 thousand Swiss francs (about 680 thousand euros), half of which is allocated by the winners to research projects conducted by young scholars.

 Four categories are awarded: "letters", "moral sciences and arts", "physical, mathematical, natural sciences and medicine"; the award for "humanity, peace and brotherhood among peoples" is awarded at intervals not shorter than three years. The announcement of the 2019 Balzan Awards was made by the president of the Fondazione, Professor Enrico Decleva, and the president of the General Awards Committee of the Fondazione Balzan, Luciano Maiani.

The awards ceremony will take place in Bern on November 15th, with the President of the National Council of the Swiss Confederation, Marina Carobbio.

Etienne Ghys (permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences, Institut de France, Paris; CNRS research director, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon) stated: "Luigi Ambrosio is an extraordinary mathematician whose ability to synthesize has allowed us to build unexpected bridges between partial differential equations and the calculation of variations, a sector of mathematics directed towards the search for optimal forms. His influence on the analysis in spaces of very general functions is exceptional ”.

Professor Luigi Ambrosio is Director of the Scuola Normale (for the six-year period 2019-2025): he was also an undergraduate and a postgraduate student at the Scuola Normale and has been a full professor of Mathematical Analysis since 1998. This prestigious award was also given to another normalista, Carlo Ginzburg, in 2010, for the "letters " category.

Jacques Aumont (France) of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris; Michael Cook (United Kingdom), of Princeton University (USA) and the research group coordinated by Werner Seeger (Germany), are the other winners of the 2019 Balzan awards.