Francis Clarke (mathematician)


Frank "Francis" H. Clarke is a Canadian and French mathematician.

Biography

Francis Clarke graduated in 1969 from McGill University with a B.Sc. degree in 1969 and in 1973 from the University of Washington with a Ph.D with thesis advisor R. Tyrrell Rockafellar. In 1978 Clarke became a full professor at the University of British Columbia and gave an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki. In 1984 he was appointed director of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques of the University of Montreal. During the nine years of his directorship, CRM became Canada's leading national research center for mathematics and its applications. The successes of Clarke's directorship included the creation of workshops and postdoctoral fellowships, thematic years, two series of publications, research awards, and an endowment fund. Francis Clarke is also the founding director of the Institut des Sciences Mathématiques of Quebec.
In 1995 Francis Clarke was appointed full professor at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, where he was a member of the Institut Camille-Jordan. In 2000 he was appointed to a chair in mathematical theory of control at the Institut universitaire de France. In 2004, he chaired the selection committee for the first joint conference of the six mathematical societies of Canada and France.

Research

Francis Clarke is known for his contributions to nonsmooth analysis, and particularly for his theory of generalized gradients, as well as for his work in optimization, the equations differentials, control theory, calculation of variations, and modeling in several application domains. His book Optimization and Nonsmooth Analysis has over 11600 citations.

Awards and honours