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On April 19, at 12:00, the University of Barcelona will award an honorary doctorate to the researcher and professor of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim (NTNU) Kristian Seip. Professor Joaquim Ortega will take part as godfather. During the event, the extraordinary degree awards for the 2021-2022 academic year will be presented and can be followed online on UBtv.
Kristian Seip is one of the fundamental figures in mathematical analysis, a branch of mathematics that analyzes functions, that is, it decomposes them into superpositions of more elementary functions. His field of expertise includes complex real-world analysis and its interactions with other fields. During the last decades he has made contributions that have been extremely influential, both from a theoretical perspective—with operator theory and number theory—and in more applied areas, among which signal theory stands out.
Faced with a basic problem in this field, such as the limits of the efficient compression capacity of analog signals, Professor Seip managed to export classical mathematical techniques, which had their origin in Beurling's results from the sixties, to establish which were these limits; specifically, with Gabor wavelets, a system for digitizing analog signals. Furthermore, his solutions were also later applied in other digitization systems.
Break new ground around one of the problems of the Millennium Prize
The NTNU professor has also been one of the leaders in research on the Riemann function, which appears in the Riemann hypothesis, a conjecture related to the distribution of prime numbers in the set of natural numbers, which is one of the most complex open problems of contemporary mathematics. Colloquially called "the beast", it has been chosen as one of the Millennium Prize challenges by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI). His work on the connection of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function and the Dirichlet series has introduced new tools to improve the results in the study of these series, in addition to having posed new problems and techniques in a field that was already well worked on. .
Beyond scientific excellence, it is worth highlighting Professor Seip's commitment to mathematical scientific structures in Catalonia: he is editor of Collectanea Mathematica, the UB's mathematics magazine; He is part of the Scientific Committee of the Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer prize, awarded by the foundation that has the same name, and has also been a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Center for Mathematical Research.
Kristian Seip (Norway, 1962) obtained his PhD from the Norwegian Institute of Technology (later Norwegian University of Science and Technology) in 1988, and in 1993 he became a full professor. He has been a guest lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin (1998) and was editorial staff of the journal Acta Mathematica between 2003 and 2012. He also chaired the Norwegian Mathematical Society between 2003 and 2007, while from 2007 to 2010 he was part of the committee of the prestigious Abel Prize, equivalent to the Nobel Prize in other disciplines. He is currently a member of, among others, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters and the American Mathematical Society, and editor of the Journal of Functional.
