Lawrence C. Evans

Who is Lawrence C. Evans?

Lawrence Craig Evans is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. with thesis advisor Michael G. Crandall at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1975.

His research is in the field of nonlinear partial differential equations, primarily elliptic equations. In 2004, he shared the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research with Nicolai V. Krylov for their proofs, found independently, that solutions of concave, fully nonlinear, uniformly elliptic equations are twice differentiable. Evans also made significant contributions to the development of the theory of viscosity solutions of nonlinear equations, to the understanding of the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation arising in stochastic optimal control theory, and to the theory of harmonic maps. He is also well known as the author of the textbook Partial Differential Equations, which is currently the standard introduction to the theory at the graduate level.

In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.