Tribute to Krzysztof Gawędzki (1947 – 2022)

Krzysztof Gawędzki, emeritus CNRS research director at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Lyon, died on Friday, January 21, 2022, at the age of 74.

A physicist, he had obtained his PhD from the University of Warsaw, where he worked as a researcher until 1979. He was then invited to Harvard University, and arrived in France in 1981. He was a CNRS research director at IHES from 1984 to 2001, before joining the ENS in Lyon. During the 17 years he spent at the Institute, he played a leading role in promoting mathematical physics thanks to his broad knowledge in this domain. He also greatly contributed to the scientific activity of IHES by organizing a regular seminar on theoretical physics.

His contributions have been extremely diverse, on topics ranging from quantum field theory and conformal theories to turbulence and non-equilibrium physics.

During his time at IHES, his work greatly contributed to the rigorous understanding of renormalization group transformations in quantum field theory. His interests then moved to conformal field theory in two dimensions (in particular to the Wess-Zumino-Witten-Novikov models), and to Chern-Simons theory. He then focused on the study of turbulence by describing the anomalous behavior of the advection of a scalar field. More recently, Gawędzki made fundamental contributions to non-equilibrium statistical mechanics.

In 2022, he shared with Antti Kupiainen the “Dannie Heineman” prize for mathematical physics from the American Physical Society “for fundamental contributions to quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, and fluid dynamics using geometric, probabilistic, and renormalization group ideas.”