For Cristiana De Filippis, work is a passion, and Maria Colombo casually reconciles her theoretical analyses of fluid behavior with her private life in which she has just become a mother for the fourth time: they are the two Italian winners of the most important European prize for mathematics, awarded by the European Mathematical Society, a veritable Oscar in this discipline.

The award, worth 5,000 euros, is often the antechamber to the Fields medal, considered the Nobel Prize in mathematics, and was presented in Seville, Spain, at the opening of the European Congress of Mathematics under way until July 19.

“I'm very happy that my passion and my work, mathematics, coincide,” says Cristiana De Filippis, 31, of Matera, a chair at the University of Parma and considered by Forbes magazine to be one of Italy's 100 most successful women of 2023. According to the American Mathematical Society's database, De Filippis is also among the most cited people in world mathematics in her generation. In Seville, she is being honored for her “outstanding contributions” to the Theory of Elliptic Regularity, and the recognition adds to the long list of awards she has won so far, such as the G-Research Prize received at Oxford in 2019 and The Iapichino Prize from the Accademia dei Lincei in 2020.

“I am what could be called a 'returning brain': after a few months in France for an internship and in Oxford for my doctorate, which ended in 2020, I returned to Italy attracted by the research in high-level analysis that was being done by the group at the University of Parma,” the researcher says again. Her field of research is “regularity for differential equations. There are equations that describe physical phenomena, such as electric fields or elasticity of materials. Mathematicians,” the researcher continues, ‘have found solutions to these equations, but they do not know whether they are ’smooth,‘ that is, they possess regularities, or whether they have ripples or kinks called ’irregular points.' For many specific problems this 'smoothness' was not known and was studied and clarified with new techniques that I helped create.” Mathematics is not his only passion: “I like riding horses. I have a horse and when I'm in Matera I'm on a permanent basis with him.”

Maria Colombo, 35, had a baby three days ago and was unable to collect the award personally. A colleague did it for her. “I am very honored for this award, which for me is the fruit of a history in mathematics, studded with encounters with great masters and collaborators,” said the researcher.

Born in Luino (Varese) 35 years ago, Colombo teaches at the Lausanne Polytechnic Institute and is being honored “for her innovative contributions to incompressible fluid dynamics, transport equations and the calculus of variations.” She also has a long list of awards to her credit, such as the Iciam Collatz Prize and the Peter Lax Award.