Alexis Vasseur

Schlumberger Chair for Mathematical Sciences

Mathematician Alexis Vasseur studies the equations governing fluids to understand how complex phenomena such as shocks, turbulence, and singularities emerge and evolve.

Alexis Vasseur is a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the John T. Stuart III Centennial Professorship. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris before earning his PhD in mathematics from the Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University in 1999 under the supervision of Yann Brenier. He subsequently held a permanent research position at the CNRS and was a professor at the University of Oxford before joining UT Austin. He has been a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2016.

His research focuses primarily on partial differential equations applied to fluid mechanics. He is particularly interested in the Navier–Stokes equations, which describe the motion of viscous fluids, as well as hyperbolic conservation laws and kinetic equations. These mathematical tools make it possible to move between microscopic descriptions, in which the individual particles of a system are tracked, and macroscopic descriptions of phenomena such as the flow of gases and liquids. A central question in his work is to understand under what conditions these equations have solutions, how those solutions evolve, and whether they remain stable.

An important part of his research concerns the regularity and stability of solutions, as well as transitions between different descriptions of fluid systems. He has worked on the stability of shocks in gas-dynamics equations, hydrodynamic limits of kinetic equations, and compressible Navier–Stokes equations. His work combines analysis, differential-equation theory, and fluid mechanics to understand how complex behaviors — such as shocks, turbulence, and singularities — can emerge in physical systems.

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