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Who is Lennart Carleson?


The Arne Beurling Library at the University of Uppsala

Lennart Axel Edvard Carleson was born on 18 March 1928 in Stockholm. He studied at Uppsala University, where he took his doctoral degree in 1950, under the guidance of the great Swedish mathematician Arne Beurling. At the mere age of 26, he became a professor at the University of Stockholm, but he returned a year later to Uppsala and a professorship there. Since then he has held professorships at both the University of California, Los Angeles and at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

In the period 1968-84, he was director of the Institut Mittag-Leffler at Djursholm, just North of Stockholm. Gösta Mittag-Leffler built this magnificent building at the end of the nineteenth century as a residence, a library and a place where the cultural and academic elite could gather. After Mittag-Leffler's death in 1927, it grew rather quiet under the trees in the park at Djursholm. Carleson, however, recognised the place's potential, arranged the financing and laid the foundation for the Institut Mittag-Leffler that the international community of mathematicians knows today, a centre where researchers from all over the world line up to conduct their research for brief or more extended periods of time.

For 23 years from 1956 to 1979, Carleson was editor of Acta Mathematica, a journal with a long, illustrious history, which is based at the Institut Mittag-Leffler. In the period 1978-82, Carleson was president of the International Mathematical Union. He worked hard to have the People's Republic of China represented in the Union, a major political affair at the time.

Carleson has been an invited guest speaker three times at the International Mathematics Conference, and on one of these occasions he was a plenary speaker. This is regarded as a highly prestigious honour in the international community of mathematicians.

Carleson has honorary doctorates at a number of universities and has been elected a corresponding member of a number of Academies of Science and Letters, including the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. He has been awarded a number of distinctions for his work, e.g. the Leroy P. Steele Prize from The American Mathematical Society in 1984, the Wolf Prize in 1992, the Lomonosov Gold Medal from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2002, the Sylvester Medal from the Royal Society of London in 2003 and now the Abel Prize as the current pinnacle in 2006.