The Wallenberg Prize to two Gothenburg mathematicians
This year’s receivers of the Wallenberg Prize in Mathematics, Eusebio Gardella and Simon Larson, are awarded for their contributions to operator algebras and spectral analysis, respectively.
Both prize winners are employed at the Division of Analysis and Probability Theory at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg. They also have in common that they have received starting grants from the Swedish Research Council, Eusebio Gardella in 2022 after having begun the year before and Simon Larson when he came to the department in 2024, and that they have received grants from the Knut and Alice Wallenbergs Foundation’s Mathematics Program, 2024 and 2025 respectively.
Eusebio is awarded “for his significant and influential contributions to the theory of operator algebras”. He received his PhD from the University of Oregon in 2015 and was then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Münster. Eusebio works primarily on C*-dynamical systems, with a particular interest in the structure and classification of amenable group actions on simple, nuclear C*-algebras, and is also interested in ergodic theory and abstract harmonic analysis, as well as the interactions of model theory and descriptive set theory. One of Eusebio’s PhD students, Jan Gundelach, will defend his thesis next week, Rigidity and embedding phenomena in operator algebras. Read more about Eusebio’s research: Distinguishing simple from complex dynamics.
Simon is awarded “for his many important contributions to spectral analysis, especially his deep results concerning eigenvalue asymptotics of the Laplace operator on convex domains”. He received his PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2019 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech and the University of Gothenburg. Simon’s research is in analysis, mainly focused towards spectral theory of differential operators, and he is particularly interested in sharp inequalities, shape optimization problems, semiclassical spectral asymptotics, and the analysis of one-dimensional Schrödinger operators. Simon recently gave his docent lecture: Listening to geometry and counting eigenvalues. Read more about Simon’s research: Quantitative methods in semiclassical spectral theory.
The award was announced at the annual meeting of the Swedish Mathematical Society held in Stockholm on 29 May and will be given at the autumn meeting on November 20, together with the prize money of 300,000 SEK, which will be divided equally between the two awardees.
The Wallenberg Prize has been awarded since 1983 by the Swedish Mathematical Society to particularly promising young Swedish mathematicians that have a PhD. It is the most prestigious award that a young Swedish mathematician can receive in the country. The stated intention of the prize is to encourage mathematical research.