Xavier Tolsa, ICREA research professor at the Department of Mathematics of the UAB has been awarded the National Research Prize in the Julio Rey Pastor category for his recognized national and international career in the area of harmonic analysis, potential theory, and geometric function theory, solving important problems in his field of knowledge such as Painlevé's problem on the geometric characterization of removable sets. The National Research Prize has 20 categories, each endowed with 30,000 euros, and is “the most important recognition in Spain in the field of scientific research.”.
Xavier Tolsa earned his PhD in mathematics from the UAB in 1998. After spending a year at the University of Göteborg and another year at the Université de Paris-Sud, in 2001 he began working at the Department of Mathematics of the UAB with a Ramon y Cajal grant, and in 2003 he obtained an ICREA position, with which he remains at the UAB. His research has taken place in the area of mathematical analysis, and more specifically in harmonic analysis, geometric measure theory, potential theory, and other related areas. His results include the resolution of numerous open problems, such as Painlevé's problem for bounded analytic functions (posed at the beginning of the 20th century) or the proof of the semiadditivity of analytic capacity, conjectured in the 1960s. In other recent collaborative works, he has solved the David and Semmes problem, the two-phase problem for harmonic measure, and Carleson's epsilon^2 conjecture. For his results, he has received several awards, such as the Salem Prize in 2002, the European Mathematical Society Prize in 2004, and the King James I Prize for Basic Research in 2019.