About the 2022 Excelsior Lecturer

Sijue Wu is a mathematical analyst well-known for her contributions to the areas of Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations, especially in the field of fluid dynamics.

Professor Wu earned bachelor's and master's degrees in 1983 and 1986 from Peking University. She completed her doctorate in 1990 from Yale University, on topics pertaining to harmonic analysis and minimal surfaces. After spending some time at New York University, the Institute for Advanced Study, Northwestern University, and the University of Iowa, she became an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland in 1998. Since 2005, Sijue Wu is the Browne Professor of Science at the University of Michigan.

Professor Wu was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002.

Professor Wu has been the recipient of numerous other honours and distinctions, including the Satter Prize in 2001, the silver Morningside Medal in 2001, and the gold Morningside Medal in 2010. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.

Even though her early research was in harmonic analysis, Professor Wu is best known for her contributions to the study of Partial Differential Equations, especially the behaviour of fluid surfaces, described by the so-called water waves equation. In her seminal 1997 paper in Inventiones Mathematicae, she introduced completely new methods to the study of the motion of water waves, based on conformal mappings, which are now fundamental to the field. Her work also includes contributions to the analysis of Euler's equation and of vortex sheets.

More recently, Professor Wu's research has dealt with singularities on fluid surfaces and their dynamics, which correspond to singular solutions that do not fit in the usual spaces of functions employed to study this problem.