Rate My Professor Charles Fefferman

Charles Fefferman, a prominent mathematician in the field of Mathematics, is the Herbert E. Jones, Jr. '43 University Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. He received a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Maryland in 1966 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1969 under the supervision of Elias M. Stein. His professional career commenced as a lecturer at Princeton from 1969 to 1970. He then held positions at the University of Chicago as assistant professor from 1970 to 1971 and professor from 1971 to 1973, achieving full professorship at age 22, one of the youngest in U.S. history. Since 1973, Fefferman has been at Princeton, serving as professor until 1984 and then in his current endowed chair. He chaired the Princeton Mathematics Department from 1999 to 2002 and has undertaken visiting appointments at institutions including the California Institute of Technology, Courant Institute, University of Paris, and Weizmann Institute.

Fefferman's research focuses on analysis, encompassing harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, Fourier analysis, several complex variables, fluid dynamics, and the Whitney extension problem. Among his influential publications are 'The multiplier problem for the ball' (Annals of Mathematics, 1971), 'H_p spaces of several variables' with E. M. Stein (Acta Mathematica, 1972), 'The uncertainty principle' (Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 1983), 'A sharp form of Whitney's extension theorem' (Annals of Mathematics, 2005), and series on fitting C^m-smooth functions to data (2004-2005). His seminal contributions have earned the Fields Medal (1978), Alan T. Waterman Award (1976, inaugural recipient), Salem Prize (1971), Bergman Prize (1992), Bôcher Memorial Prize (2008), Wolf Prize in Mathematics (2017), and BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2022). Elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1979), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1972), and American Philosophical Society (1989), he serves on editorial boards of Communications in Partial Differential Equations, Advances in Mathematics, and Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications. Fefferman has given distinguished lectures, including the Hour Address at the 1982 International Congress of Mathematicians and the Inaugural Antoni Zygmund Lecture Series at the University of Chicago.