Today, July 2, at the opening of the sixth conference of the European Mathematical Society, the leading European organization dedicated to the development of mathematics, ten prizes reserved for European mathematicians under 35 were awarded. Two of the awards went to young mathematicians who studied at the Scuola Normale: Corinna Ulcigrai, an undergraduate student from 1998 to 2002, and Alessio Figalli, a graduate and PhD student from 2002 to 2007.

Every four years the European Mathematical Society (EMS) calls mathematicians from around the world to this important event, with a total of almost a thousand mathematicians involved. The sixth conference is currently taking place in Krakow, Poland, the previous meetings were held in Paris, Budapest, Barcelona, Stockholm and Amsterdam. During the opening ceremony the ten awards were announced of researchers under 35 years of age of European nationality or have worked in Europe, in recognition of their fundamental contributions to mathematical studies. The winners were selected by a committee of about 15 internationally recognized mathematicians covering a wide variety of fields. The committee was chaired by Professor Frances Kirwan (Oxford, UK). Some of the winners of previous editions were then given the most important award for young mathematicians, the Fields Medal.

Corinna Ulcigrai, 32, graduated in mathematics at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 2002 and then did her PhD in mathematics at Princeton University (2007), under the supervision of Ya. G. Sinai. Since 2007 she has been a lecturer and an RCUK Fellow at the University of Bristol. The European Mathematical Society awarded her “for advancing our understanding of dynamical systems and the mathematical characterizations of chaos, and especially for solving a long-standing fundamental question on the mixing property for locally Hamiltonian surface flows”. Alessio Figalli, 28, graduated in mathematics at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 2006 and continued his studies at the Normale and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon in 2007. He is currently a professor at the University of Texas in Austin. His prize was “for his outstanding contributions to the regularity theory of optimal transport maps, to quantitative geometric and functional inequalities and to partial solutions of the Mather and Mañé conjectures in the theory of dynamical systems”.