About the 2018 Excelsior Lecturer
Alice Chang is a mathematical analyst whose areas of expertise range from harmonic analysis and partial differential equations to differential geometry. She is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University.
Professor Chang received her Bachelor of Science degree in 1970 from National Taiwan University, and her doctorate in 1974 from the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she wrote her thesis on the study of bounded analytic functions. She became a full professor at UCLA in 1980, moving to Princeton in 1998.
Professor Chang has given several lectures at the International Congress of Mathematicians, including most recently the Emmy Noether Lecture at ICM 2018, Rio de Janeiro.
Among numerous other distinctions and honors, Professor Chang has received the Sloan and Guggenheim fellowships, is a recipient of the Satter Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Science and of Academia Sinica and a fellow of the National Academy of Science. In 2016, Professor Chang has been named an AMS fellow.
Professor Chang's research has impacted many different fields and influenced the work of many mathematicians, some present at this conference.
Her earliest research was in the fields of complex and harmonic analysis, but more recently she has made fundamental contributions to the study of geometric PDEs, especially problems related to conformal geometry.
Among her many important results one can cite her work on optimal transport, with surprising applications to the study of isoperimetric inequalities.