Celebration of Women in Math Day

Featured talk:
A small window on wave turbulence theory

Wave turbulence theory is a vast subject and its goal is to formulate for us a global picture of wave interactions. Phenomena involving interactions of waves happen at different scales and in different media: from gravitational waves to the waves on the surface of the ocean, from our milk and coffee in the morning to infinitesimal particles that behave like wave packets in quantum physics. These phenomena are difficult to study in a rigorous mathematical manner, but because of this challenge, mathematicians have developed interdisciplinary approaches that are powerful and beautiful. I will describe some of these approaches and I will outline along the way questions that remain open in spite of the great progress already made.

Bio
https://math.mit.edu/~gigliola/

Gigliola Staffilani is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Mathematics at MIT. She received the B.S. equivalent from the University of Bologna in 1989, and M.S and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago in 1991 and 1995, respectively. Carlos Kenig was her doctoral advisor. Following a Szegö Assistant Professorship at Stanford, she had faculty appointments at Stanford, Princeton and Brown, before joining the MIT mathematics faculty in 2002. Professor Staffilani is an analyst, with a concentration on dispersive nonlinear PDEs. At Stanford, she received the Harold M. Bacon Memorial Teaching Award in 1997, and was given the Frederick E. Terman Award for young faculty in 1998. In 2013 she was elected member of the Massachusetts Academy of Science and a Fellow of the AMS, and in 2014 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017 she was named a Fellow of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a Fellow of the Simons Foundation. She was elected Member of National Academy of Sciences in 2021. Her research has been uninterruptedly funded by NSF since 1998.