Professor Athanassios Fokas awarded 2025 Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award
Congratulations to Professor Athanassios Fokas, eminent mathematician and Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, for receiving the 2025 California Institute of Technology Distinguished Alumni Award. The award is the highest honour for Caltech alumni, and is granted to those who have made remarkable impacts in a field, on the community, or in society more broadly.
“The Distinguished Award recipients have leveraged their Caltech educations to illuminate the mysteries of nature and to apply their insights for the good of society,” says Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. “The interests of the 2025 class range across the disciplines, exemplifying Caltech’s approach to research and the extraordinary power created when basic discovery is paired with a clear vision of the future.”
Professor Fokas is honored for his contributions spanning science, medicine, and the arts, including advances in partial differential equations, mathematical physics, the life sciences, and nuclear imaging for diagnosis and discovery, and for his work explaining and enlivening science and mathematics for the public.
Fokas’s contributions span the disciplines. Among the most cited mathematicians, he joined with colleagues to solve all key open problems in the algebraic analysis of integrable nonlinear partial differential equations; invented a transform method that bears his name and is used in mathematical physics; and advanced asymptotic methods, including some applicable to problems in general relativity. His algorithms have improved nuclear imaging for diagnosis and have been used to create the most complete description of currents in the brain. His broader contributions to biomedical science include models of leukemia dynamics, protein folding, and COVID-19 wave dynamics.
Fokas, a passionate science communicator whose lectures have been attended by thousands, is a member of Greece’s Academy of Athens and a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the American Mathematical Society. He has received the London Mathematical Society’s Naylor Prize, the European Academy of Science’s Blaise Pascal Medal, and membership in Greece’s Order of the Phoenix.