Sylvia Serfaty

Sylvia Serfaty is an expert in the calculus of variations and nonlinear partial differential equations. Motivated by problems from condensed matter physics (especially superconductivity, but also micromagnetics, Coulomb systems, vortex dynamics, and other examples), she has developed fundamentally new tools for analyzing the structure and dynamics of defects and the spatial patterns they tend to form (including the Abrikosov lattice seen in type-II superconductors). Recently she has also made dramatic progress on the statistical physics of many-particle systems with long-range interactions, including problems from approximation theory and probability.