Xavier Tolsa, City of Barcelona Award in Fundamental Sciences and Mathematics
Department of Mathematics lecturer Xavier Tolsa has been awarded the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize in the category of Fundamental Sciences and Mathematics, granted by the Barcelona City Council. The awards will be presented next Wednesday 11 February at a ceremony at the Saló de Cent.
Xavier Tolsa Domènech, ICREA researcher in the Department of Mathematics at the UAB, was named one of the winners of the 2025 City of Barcelona Awards, the 76th edition of awards given by the Barcelona City Council to distinguish excellence in the fields of culture, science and education, with recognitions grouped into 19 categories.
Xavier Tolsa has been awarded the City of Barcelona Award in the category of Fundamental Sciences and Mathematics for his work "Carleson’s Conjecture in Higher Dimensions" (Inventiones Mathematicae, 2025). The jury has agreed to award the distinction due to the relevance of this result in fundamental mathematics, which lies in the fact that it intertwines two different fields, analysis and geometry, and describes the same object from two completely different perspectives. For the jury, this work represents the culmination of a long research project to integrate techniques from geometric measure theory with classical analysis and partial differential equations. According to them, the result can have a great impact on the resolution of equations in domains with very irregular boundaries, and has a wide range of potential applications in problems of interest to the scientific community.
He obtained his PhD in mathematics in 1998 from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona after studying engineering and mathematics. He spent approximately one year at Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg, Sweden) and another year at the University of Paris-Sud (Paris, France). He joined the UAB as a Ramon y Cajal researcher in 2001 and has been an ICREA research professor in the Department of Mathematics since 2003. He has received several awards such as the Salem Prize (2002), the Prize of the European Mathematical Society (2004), the King Jaume I Prize (2019) and the Julio Rey Pastor National Prize (2024). He was a guest speaker at the European Congress of Mathematics in Stockholm (2004) and the International Conference of Mathematicians in Madrid (2006), and will be a plenary speaker at the International Conference of Mathematicians in Philadelphia (2026). He has also obtained two ERC Advanced Grants as a principal investigator (2013–2018, 2021–2026).
Xavier Tolsa's research focuses on harmonic analysis, geometric measure theory, and potential theory. More recently, he has also been interested in elliptic partial differential equations and free boundary problems. In particular, he is interested in the relationship between analytical notions such as analytic capacity and harmonic measure, and geometric concepts such as rectifiability.
The awards will be presented on Wednesday 11 February at a ceremony at the Barcelona City Council's Saló de Cent, which will be broadcast live by Betevé TV.